Posted by EnKiKur (anonymous) on May 10, 2008 at 3:37 a.m. (Suggest removal)

"The Mississippi Curriculum Test, meant to judge a schools progress, is one of the most highly anticipated events of the school year."

"Superintendent of the Natchez-Adams School District Anthony Morris said almost everything the district’s teachers do in a school year is aimed at preparing students for the test."

“It’s extremely important,” Morris said of the test."

How many of you see that the "extremely important" focus of this test is not your child's performance, but the school's performance? Why is the school's performance more important than your child's performance? What are the schools doing?

You can read 'Brave New Schools', 'Underground History of American Education', and 'The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America' to answer those questions, but I'll give you the short form.

The school's performance is more important than your child's performance because the Dept. of Education wants to know how good a job the local schools are doing in changing any life attitudes and behaviors you may have imparted to your children that are not in line with the attitudes and behaviors the Dept. of Education wants your children to have. The job of the schools is no longer to impart knowledge to your children, but to impart the feelings necessary for total social restructuring.

An example given in 'Brave New Schools' is the story of the bread baking hen who asked the other animals in the barnyard to help her make the bread. They all refused but when the bread was done they all wanted some. Likely you would feel the moral to the story is that the other animals should have helped make the bread; the Dept. of Education wants your children to feel the hen is stingy for not sharing. Get the difference? When your school is successful in getting your child to think in the second way, it is level five.

Posted by EnKiKur (anonymous) on May 10, 2008 at 4:03 a.m. (Suggest removal)

The focus is on the school and not on your child because your child is being taught that group effort, on behalf of the school, is more important than individual effort. That is why Hank Bounds said he didn't want to have any part in getting rid of Morris, because Morris is a loyal soldier, in my opinion, to this social change effort. He certainly uses the language of values based education.

And the poor kids are giving up their free time after being subjected to months of pressure over this test for the sake of the school...and all the while Morris and Bounds have no faith in their own system because the children are led to believe they are testing their own skill against that of others...which would be an expression of individualism and not collectivism.

Under the old system of education, values were based on the absolute values of Biblical right and wrong, still enjoying some popularity among the people but anathema to public education. The new value system is one of relative values, where the child is encouraged to develop his own value system, but guided through various techniques into adopting the value system the Dept. of Education holds, through any means necessary.

Under the old system, there were locally elected school boards, and this was the meaning of local control of schools. The new definition of local control of schools is perhaps elected but preferably appointed boards who choose from a menu of offered learning programs. What this is in reality is centralized control necessary for meeting the new aims of education.

Don't take my word for any of this though. Read as much as you can about this. Those three books I mentioned are a good place to start. You can read Underground History of American Education and The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America online, the authors don't even want you to have to pay them. The author of the first was a teacher in New York for thirty years, and the author of the second is the former number two in the Dept. of Education under Reagan. All you have to do is google the titles of the books.

Posted by EnKiKur (anonymous) on May 10, 2008 at 4:16 a.m. (Suggest removal)

"In the classroom, this process of change often begins with planned "visions" that plant vivid but unrealistic goals into children's minds and emotions.

Next, students must learn to visualize scary images of the current crisis. The crisis is vital to the process. It provides the justification for environmental activism, government control, and unthinkable changes. So, in stark contrast to the lofty ideal in the song above, the students must learn to feel the pain of a dying earth abused by the ruling generation. The colorful classroom manual on global change, Rescue Mission Planet Earth, fits the bill. It is full of scary, sensational pictures and misguided children's opinions that fire the imagination and fuel anger.

Trained teacher/facilitators turn this anger toward parents and grandparents who must bear the blame for destroying our planet. This is important, because -- as in totalitarian countries around the world -- children must learn to submit to state-defined values and loyalties -- not their parents or traditional values.

In Rescue Mission Planet Earth, page after page of pseudo-science and twisted facts prepare the reader to follow the call to political action on behalf of the United Nations and planet Earth. Unless they know the facts, children and their teachers will have little resistance to the heart-breaking images of dying trees, starving children, abused women and an overcrowded planet drowning in pollution and rising oceans.

As Al Gore wrote in Earth in the Balance, "I strongly urge the establishment of a Mission to Planet Earth, a worldwide monitoring system staffed by children...design to rescue the global environment."

The above is from Berit Kjos, author of 'Brave New Schools'. You can visit one of his pages at http://www.crossroad.to/articles2/brainw... for more of his writing and lots of interesting links. Learn about what is going on under your noses, paid for with your tax money.

Posted by EnKiKur (anonymous) on May 10, 2008 at 5:25 a.m. (Suggest removal)

Understanding Educational Vocabulary:

http://www.crossroad.to/charts/NewMeanin...

Interesting Educational Quotes:

Anthony Morris, 7/9/2007
"I want us to be known for having a curriculum in place to help our students to survive in a global society," he said.
7/9/2003

his goal is to have your child subsist as a global worker

Norris Edney, 4/10/2007

Edney stressed the original reason for the latest problems at RLMS — the failure to test enough students in nine federally-mandated subgroups.

“If a kid, one kid, misses that kid could affect four subgroups,” Edney said. “All we have to do is send the right number of kids. Be sure they get there. That sounds simple because it is real simple.”

your child is important because your child is a sub-group

Anthony Morris, 3/2/2008

With us living in a global society, the more diverse a classroom is, it gives our children a better view of what their working environment will be like,” he said. “Diversity is will be beneficial to them.”

the classroom is used to prepare for global diversity. what form of government does this global society have?

Anthony Morris, 8/14/2003

Morris spoke of wanting to "create a shared vision" for the district. And he ended the 2003 convocation with a story.

He encouraged the teachers to be like geese. "If we have the sense of a gooseŠ" then those in the district would fly as a flock, lift each other up, take turns completing hard jobs and stand by each other as geese do when flying south for the winter, with their flock, in their V formation.

words like vision, shared vision, and visioning are UNESCO argot. here he champions collective action among the teachers.

While I could go on for a while finding examples of speech alluding to the real educational agenda that is puzzling to people like the Committee for Better Public Schools who desire knowledge based education, the main point of these examples is that I was unable to find one single example of any suggestions from the Super or Board on how to actually improve the level of knowledge of the students. The Committee either needs to align itself with global visioning and minimal standards, or to fortify itself in its fight to gain its goal of actually educating students by learning what is actually going on in the public school system.

Posted by cevers (anonymous) on May 10, 2008 at 9:34 a.m. (Suggest removal)

Actually, the test does test how the individual child performs against him/herself, which is one of the reasons why the state is not giving performance levels this year; there's nothing to compare the child's score with since this is the first test. The individual statistic result is called a growth residual by which a child's score is compared to a previous score to determine growth. Now, based on each child's individual growth the school is given an expected amount of growth to make to either meet, exceed, or not meet the growth. The Leveled rating comes from an achievement score that is basically based on the percentages of students scoring in the four categories: minimum, basic, proficient, and advanced. The state model is different from the federal model in that the federal model does not look at the child's individual growth; it looks at the latter portion - % scoring proficient and advanced. All students in the fourteen subgroups must score proficient or advanced by 2014. Annually, schools who receive Title I money face sanctions if they fail to meet the AYP goals established for that year. Schools who do not receive Title I money are required to report their data via a school report card, but do not face sanctions, i.e., if your high school is a non-title I school - no sanctions from the federal model, but the state has its own model in place as a back-up system. At the end of the day, every child must gain at least one year's growth for one year's work. And, teachers do work individually with students to meet their individual learning needs; there's no other way. This is why students work one-to-one with the teacher or in small groups.

Posted by ntz143 (anonymous) on May 10, 2008 at 9:37 a.m. (Suggest removal)

Many schools in Miss. that are ranked Level 4 & 5 spend the entire year "teaching for the test"...they readily admit that the time spent on quality education is very minimal....its all about getting kids to score high on the MCT. And you can thank "No Child Left Behind" (and the brilliant George Bush) for that....there is not 1 educational institution or association in this country that supports "No Child Left Behind" because of the emphasis it places on test scores rather than quality education. Just pray that the NEXT president will abolish this ridiculous system (although if its McCain it probably won't happen!). It is ruining the entire country's educational system.

Posted by EnKiKur (anonymous) on May 10, 2008 at 12:54 p.m. (Suggest removal)

You sound like someone with an education degree cevers, so I forgive you for not understanding what I said in regard to children being led to believe they are testing their own skill against others, as evidenced by the statement of Corey Ashley who said "It tests how smart you are against the whole state of Mississippi."

What passes for education, and has passed for education for some seventy years now, teaches students not to read to discern the meaning of the writer, but to develop his own opinion of what the writer meant. In response to what I wrote you said "Actually, the test does measure how the child performs against him/herself". That is okay for you to say, and it is true, but my meaning was that while Morris and Bounds are obvious proponents of values based education, they have no faith in their belief system because they must trick students into using their natural competitiveness with others to give the school a high rating. Competitiveness is an individual trait and not a collective trait which is really what the schools are measuring as progress.

It is also disingenuous for the state to say it is not giving performance levels this year because there is nothing to measure against. Performance could be measured against the National Assessment of Educational Progress. States don't like to do this though, because this is where the truth comes out most clearly, comparing students in one state to students in another state where the schools may be horrendously bad or very good. States often manipulate the findings of the tests they administer in an effort to make themselves look good. The benchmark the states use is not an absolute, but arbitrary. Mississippi is resetting its benchmark, and I have to wonder why. Maybe if you lower the benchmark performance and growth will look better, for a while. It is all about how the school looks.

An assessment, which is really what these tests are, is a measure of value. A test is, traditionally at least, a measure of knowledge.

Morris has said his goal is to put in place a curriculum that prepares students to survive in a global society. He did not say that his goal was to put in place a curriculum to encourage each child to excel. Public education is about minimum standards and maximum shift in values.

I recently took the 11th grade version of the Texas version of this assessment. I spent an average of 20 minutes on the four sections and scored 80 to 90 on each section after being out of school since 1975. The test was very easy. Had I bothered to use paper for the math section I would have scored 100. A few months ago I took the 1898 12th grade final exam from a small school in Kansas. I scored a little less than thirty percent. That test was very hard.

Posted by EnKiKur (anonymous) on May 10, 2008 at 1:59 p.m. (Suggest removal)

Why continually pit a student against himself? (it is okay to say himself instead of himself/herself cever, it is not sexist it is just traditional form. I know it is at odds with the value shift that says it is okay for a woman to kill his/her child before birth, and that a child is just tissue until it receives a Social Security number, but there it is)

Apart from drilling into the student that the student should be working for the good of the school, it also exposes the student over and over to material that contradicts the value systems of the parents.

NASD is a perfect example of high failure rate, both in imparting true education and in shifting the values of the 14 sub-groups of the student population.

What happens when children have no framework of absolute value? They become purely sensual creatures, seeking ever higher levels of sensory experience. The violence, lack of respect for parents, teachers, and themselves that we see so much of locally is the direct result of the type of education Morris has been trained to support in his capacity as a change agent.

In one regared the disrespectful, un-redeucated waifs of Natchez may be a better hope for the continuance of the idea of individuality over the idea of global socialism (because that is value shift behind the public school agenda). These wild young people instinctively reject the proposition that they should do what someone else tells them to do just because the other person thinks his way is the right way. Hopefully the natural instinct of self preservation will allow them to live long enough to develop a moral system of harmony on their own to replace the one taken from them by public education.

Posted by LocustStorm (anonymous) on May 10, 2008 at 4:13 p.m. (Suggest removal)

**applauding EnKiKur**

Posted by cevers (anonymous) on May 10, 2008 at 6:20 p.m. (Suggest removal)

EnKiKur,
Interesting comments....yes, I am an educator here in MS. I guess the comments are interesting to me because I spent nine years of my career in Natchez as a teacher and principal; I left to pursue my terminal degree. For the last five years I've served as a principal of a school that moved from level 3 to level 5 in two years under my leadership, and I am currently a curriculum director and test coordinator for a district with high performing schools. In each of my experiences, we (the teachers and I) had to teach students how to take standardized tests, but the emphasis was always focused on creating critical thinkers who could solve real-world problems. Students who are critical thinkers are typically good test takers because they can reason through test items. In the real-world, we take tests. Lawyers take them to become lawyers, doctors to become doctors, teachers to become teachers and so on. We are always being assessed, i.e., one can't get a driver's license without, you guessed it, an assessment. While assessment can cause issues such as those noted, we, as educators, must learn to create a good balance to enable students to have real choices at the end of their school career.
I believe the NAEP test results are what drove the MS Dept. of Education and other leaders to increase the rigor of the new assessment; to see how things have change review the practice tests; they are now online on the state department's webpage. We really can’t compare our state test which is criterion referenced to the NAEP test which is norm referenced; it'd be like comparing apples and oranges. However, we do know that on the old MCT test, students would score high; yet, when faced with the NAEP, those same students (4th and 8th graders only) would falter. I encourage parents and community members to review the new practice tests or take them like you've done to get an idea of the changes in rigor. Many of the items are written at Norman Webb's Depth of Knowledge levels 2 and 3. There will not be any level 4 questions on the test because they require constructed repsonses.

Posted by AverageJoe (anonymous) on May 10, 2008 at 6:35 p.m. (Suggest removal)

Government Schools are one of the planks of the communist manifesto as well as the backbone of the fabian socialist system. How better to bring about an incremental change of values and such than one generation at a time through ever changng government policies in regards to education. As AlanKeyes once said
" Do we really think that a government-dominated education is going to produce citizens capable of dominating their government, as the education of a truly vigilant self-governing people requires?"

Posted by EnKiKur (anonymous) on May 11, 2008 at 1:06 a.m. (Suggest removal)

cevers, if you have followed the story of the FLDS CPS raid out in El Dorado you may have read the CNN story where the welfare officials said that integrating the children into public schools (where they will be exposed to multiculturalism, diverstiy, and tolerance....except for those choosing a polygamist lifestyle) would present a problem as the FLDS children were three or four grades ahead of their age group.

True, we take tests in the real world, but it was not always that way, even for doctors, lawyers, teachers and drivers. Those tests you refer to are for obtaining licenses. A license is permission to do something that would be illegal without the license. We have a government that has made many forms of earning a livelihood illegal; public schools are used to teach students that this degree of government control is normal and desirable.

I work in an industry that draws recent high school graduates from all over the South. Entry level requires the applicants be able to read well enough to understand some basic instructions and some simplified versions of applicable laws. Well over half cannot read well enough understand basic instruction.

It is wrong of you, an educator, a person of discrimination, to substitute the word assessment for the word test, to suggest they have the same meaning for they do not.

As*sess"ment\, n. [LL. assessamentum.]

1. The act of assessing; the act of determining an amount to be paid; as, an assessment of damages, or of taxes; an assessment of the members of a club.

2. A valuation of property or profits of business, for the purpose of taxation; such valuation and an adjudging of the proper sum to be levied on the property; as, an assessment of property or an assessment on property.

Note: An assessment is a valuation made by authorized persons according to their discretion, as opposed to a sum certain or determined by law. It is a valuation of the property of those who are to pay the tax, for the purpose of fixing the proportion which each man shall pay. --Blackstone. Burrill.

3. The specific sum levied or assessed

test
–noun 1. the means by which the presence, quality, or genuineness of anything is determined; a means of trial.
2. the trial of the quality of something: to put to the test.
3. a particular process or method for trying or assessing.
4. a set of questions, problems, or the like, used as a means of evaluating the abilities, aptitudes, skills, or performance of an individual or group; examination.

Posted by EnKiKur (anonymous) on May 11, 2008 at 1:15 a.m. (Suggest removal)

Your use of common language is loose, but your use of educational jargon is specific. Lawyers, priests, and other technical persons use language this way as well. As far as communicating with laymen, it has more of a tendency to obfuscate than to inform.

Thank you for taking the time to respond in an intelligent manner, for I have to admit I baited you a bit before in hopes of stirring enough emotion to gain a response. Your loose use of common language is at odds with your specific use of educational language. The language of you educators is very specific, dealing with concepts, measurements, and practices the layman is not familiar with. Lawyers and priests do this as well, as do many in other technical fields. Use of this language seems more an attempt to obfuscate than to communicate.

It is clear enough from what you have written though, that if MCT were compared to NAEP, even though they are apples and oranges as one is criterion referenced and the other norm referenced (whatever that means), laymen would not be very happy to see the results. A level 2 school in one state might be a level 5 in another. In the real world it is very clear that the US is falling further and further behind other nations that are somehow producing more critical thinkers. Can this be because of our definition of critical thinking compared to theirs?

Parents should take a look at these assessments. In fact, they should be made readily available to all taxpayers as they are a matter of public expense and public interest. All should be able to see what kind of real world problems are presented on these assessments, and they should also be informed in a simple way of the disposition of all information gleaned by state and federal government from the assessments.

Will value judgements of the moral character of students be derived from these assessments? If so, how were these values, according to what philosophy, were they derived?

I submit to you that your definition of critical thinking is thinking that is critical only of traditional values, not critical of current methods and goals.

Posted by EnKiKur (anonymous) on May 11, 2008 at 1:20 a.m. (Suggest removal)

As an experienced educator of higher level schools you should be a model of critical thinking. Can you please tell us, in a couple of paragraphs how have you applied your critical skills to the field you are engaged in? What are your conclusions about the direction of public education in America, and have you developed any personal philosophy in regard to your conclusions about your chosen field?

The people, who support this system, hear all sorts of fancy sounding words and phrases and promises but rarely do we hear in understandable terms from people inside the system how they feel about spending our money in the ways they do and turning out the results they turn out.

Why do you feel the US is falling behind in education? What do you think the problems with NASD are?

Posted by colescreek (anonymous) on May 11, 2008 at 8:58 a.m. (Suggest removal)

This is no longer fun. It has turned into a forum for anarchy and anti-everything blathering. I used to like reading other opinions on local issues, and I still do. Only now I have to weed through the crap to get to them. You can't just skip over the posts that are crap, these posts have infected the rest of the blog like a disease. The spooky thing is that some of these people are well educated. Others are just idiots that like the anti-government rhetoric. That makes me wonder where this radicalism comes from and where it is headed. Is this what you had in mind, Kevin?

Posted by EnKiKur (anonymous) on May 11, 2008 at 5:04 p.m. (Suggest removal)

This radicalism comes from the spirit of the men and women who had a vision of a new world where they could live free of religious persecution and tyrannical government, a world with a government by the people, of the people, and for the people. The word radical has two meanings that seem contradictory. Radical means of or going to the origin, and it also means a drastic departure from established order. This radicalism, the viral spread of liberty, fits both those definitions for it is both a going back to the vision of the new world and a drastic departure from the corruption of the new world vision.

Where is this radicalism headed? It is headed toward its roots in liberty. Educated, uneducated, Catholic, Protestant, Monotheistic, Pantheistic, the unalienable right of all humans is liberty. Freedom is frightening and fraught with peril.

"Those that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." (Benjamin Franklin)

"The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves." (William Hazlitt)

"I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it." (Thomas Jefferson)

"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself." (Thomas Paine)

Posted by Username (anonymous) on May 11, 2008 at 9:07 p.m. (Suggest removal)

I stand and applaud EnKiKur.
You amaze me with some of your comments.