Recently South Dakota's Secretary of Education Melody Schopp wrote an Op-Ed in the Mitchell Daily Republic that began with this:
Monday, this newspaper ran a column regarding the new accountability system for South Dakota schools. I am writing today to offer a more in-depth description of the system and to explain why this change is so important.
States across the country have been leading the discussion around accountability for some time now. When the federal government announced that it would allow states to seek waivers from certain provisions of No Child Left Behind, it provided a window of opportunity to begin the transformation to a more meaningful system of accountability.
The column Schopp referred to was written by Bob Mercer, who writes about the South Dakota DOE's plans regarding the NCLB waiver:
Schools come up for accreditation every five years. DOE leadership wants to start conducting “desk reviews” rather than sending evaluators into the field to actually visit schools.
DOE officials cite lack of money and personnel.
A few days ago the state Board of Education endorsed this change in practice. A board member asked a good question: Is a school's “climate” considered in the accreditation process?
The answer was no. That seemed to settle the matter, until a few hours later.
DOE officials began explaining to the board the waiver allowing South Dakota to stop complying with the federal No Child Left Behind system.
School climate is one of the five performance indicators in DOE's proposed 100-point system for rating schools rather than solely relying on results of NCLB's student tests.
This gets confusing.
Right now we don't have enough resources at the state Department of Education to perform site visits to schools every five years for accreditation.
Yet we are planning a new system that rates schools annually, and school climate represents 20 percent of the rating.
Here are two sentences about it from the 187-page waiver document:
“This indicator is designed to address school climate issues such as bullying and violence and other problems that create conditions that negatively impact learning.
It would include a comprehensive assessment of the major spheres of school life such as safety, relationships, teaching and learning, and healthy environment.”
This gets more confusing, however.
Mary Stadick Smith, the number two person in the state department behind Education Secretary Melody Schopp, told the state board that school climate might be dropped from the 100-point rating system.
I don't find this confusing at all. The federal government has been putting into place for decades an education system that is centrally planned and designed to control behavior. Bullying is a code word to be applied to those who do not go along with the latest New Age craze...promotion of homosexual behavior. And now they are deceptively using "school climate" when referring to the method in which they will be controlling behavior. And this system of behavior control is very expensive and is the true source of the cost problems facing education. Schopp's response admits that "school climate" is a "key" item:
First and foremost, the new system will consider multiple indicators of performance. The new accountability model is centered on a 100-point School Performance Index. The SPI consists of five key indicators — each of which accounts for a certain number of the total points. By using multiple measures of performance, we broaden the scope of our view and provide a better overall picture of how schools are performing.
The index will be phased in over the next several years, to allow time to fully study and find appropriate measurements for several of the indicators.
The five key indicators vary depending on whether the school is an elementary/middle school or a high school. They are as follows:
1) Student Achievement
2) Academic Growth OR High School Completion
3) Attendance OR College and Career Readiness
4) Teacher and Principal Effectiveness
5) School Climate
Note that the first three have been around for a while and that points four and five are now being added to increase the amount of control by the central planners. In other words, this is not a new plan...it is an expanded one.
This is how Schopp describes the enormous costs that it will take to implement this increase of central control:
The fourth and fifth indicators require significant attention and work. That work is being done by dedicated educators across the state who are part of work groups addressing teacher and principal effectiveness and school climate.
Based on these multiple indicators, the state will identify schools that are the most in need of attention. Targeted support and interventions will be aimed at those schools to assist them in raising student achievement levels within their buildings.
Significant change takes time. The approval of South Dakota’s waiver by the U.S. Department of Education was just a first step.
It will take "significant attention and work", in other words money, to set up the system that will track and then intervene on those who are not following the system of behavior control or in their words "school climate".
Mercer goes into how HB1234 plays into this scheme:
While they scramble to come up how to make a post-NCLB plan actually work, they have to wait until after the November general election to see whether they should comply with a new smorgasbord of state laws.
The South Dakota Education Association gathered enough signatures from registered voters to force a statewide vote this fall on House Bill 1234.
That sprawling piece of legislation came from the Daugaard administration and received much tinkering from members of the Legislature.
It received final approval by a single vote in the state House of Representatives. It attempts to make many, many dozens of changes affecting our public schools.
In some cases the department is proceeding with the work to comply with HB 1234, even though the legislation is in suspension until voters decide its fate.
The NCLB waiver for example contains numerous references to a teacher performance-pay system contained in HB 1234. It's unclear what happens to the waiver if 1234 is defeated.
So the teacher merit pay is part of the NCLB waiver requirements. Maryland has the same requirements as reported in February:
To receive a waiver, states have also had to adopt the common core standards, commit to giving new assessments developed to go with those standards, and create a new teacher and principal evaluation system.
Note that the "new teacher and principle evaluation system" is point 4 of Schopp's key indicators to be required by the NCLB waiver. What she did not mention was the role of the Common Core Standards. It is through standards that the central planners detail the behaviors they want adopted. Through deception we are lead to believe the standards are about academic performance. Now we are finding studies that show Common Core Standards will not increase student achievement, and may indeed reverse student achievement gains made in Massachusetts. Tests designed to test academic performance will remain flat, while other tests will reflect on how well the system is changing behaviors. What will increase will be the costs to administrate the increased controls by the central planners of...the New World Order, the cost to collect the data, and cost to implement the "interventions".
The politically correct change agents don't like it when we bring the truth, that the real aim is social engineering. Here is how they react to the exposure of their Plan:
Right-wing activists went deep into conspiracy theory territory Thursday morning during a Senate education hearing, as lawmakers discussed a Republican measure which would block implementation of voluntary national education standards in South Carolina.
Sen. Mike Fair’s one-sentence bill would mandate that Common Core standards may not be “imposed” on South Carolina, which is a bit of a misnomer given that the program is completely voluntary. The State Board of Education voted to adopt Common Core back in 2010, joining 45 other states who use the standards to determine what kind of reading and math skills should be taught in order for students to be prepared for college and the workplace.
“Teachers want to know that what they’re teaching is the same in other states, especially when student performance is being compared,” said former South Carolina School Board Association President Cindy Smith, who spoke against Fair’s bill on Thursday.
But supporters of Fair’s bill quickly turned the policy discussion into political theatre. Former Bush education official Bill Evans opened the hearing by calling Common Core standards “the Obamacare of education,” drawing audible gasps from the teachers who had packed into the standing-room-only crowd to support the standards.
If the teachers were surprised by such blatant politicization of public education, they were in for an even ruder awakening from other supporters of Fair’s measure. ”Civics is turning our kids into little political activists,” education activist Jane Robbins said about Common Core standards. “Science is all about ‘oh, global warming, and this is how to fix it!’”
Robbins also accused the federal government of using Common Core to create “massive student databases” of demographic information that can be used to automatically assign people to careers, like in Brave New World. “It’s a progressive utopian vision that has been out there for decades,” Robbins added.
Seriously. She said that. In the eyes of Common Core opponents, this voluntary coordination of state education standards is actually a nefarious plot by the New World Order to subjugate the masses into a socialist paradise where we can’t even choose our own jobs.
And while some Republicans in South Carolina are opposing "The Plan", South Dakota's Republican governor is leading the cause to implement "The Plan" as he laid it out in Januray:
I attended Governor Daugaard's budget presentation this morning in Mitchell. His goal was to promote two initiatives. One was a Workfarce Initiative and the other was in education, as the Secretary of Education was present. He actually admitted that the two were to be connected at the hip.
He started out with the South Dakota Workforce Initiative, Not sure how you get the "WINS" Initiative out of that, but he mentioned the importance of South Dakota being a part of a "global high-tech economy". The WINS web site also mentions that goal:
That's why we've launched South Dakota Wins, a workforce development program that brings together government, education and business leaders to capitalize on South Dakota's tremendous potential. The components of this program will help South Dakota develop and attract a stronger, more educated workforce, positioning us well to compete in an ever changing a dynamic global economy.
Clearly this is the "Planned Global Economy" of the New World Order as stated here. And also note the combination of "government, education and business leaders". Education is now about providing human resources to the monopoly capitalists. And for those of us who are critical thinkers, we know that planned economies are not the most efficient, and they lead us to a tyrannical situation. Daugaard proved it with statistics. From 1971 to 2011, the numbers of students in K-12 decreased 28.5% as the number of teachers increased 10%, while support and administrative headcount jumped 65%. The result has been the doubling of the cost per student while academic results remained flat.
This will help explain why the plutocrats want this plan.
Clearly his plan is an age-old "Plan" that will continue to add costs to the education system, profits to corporations, while keeping academic results flat at best. And the reason why Bob Mercer finds this all this confusing is because the implementation requires deception. No way would people with common sense (Biblical discernment) agree to "The Plan". Now we should know the real reason why the central planners don't want kids reading the Bible in school.
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