JUNE 12, 2014 LAST UPDATED: THURSDAY, JUNE 12, 2014, 5:42 PM Lisa Baney
To the Editor:
Let me start by saying I could never be a Planning Board member, but if I were, I would be so tired. Over the past 14 months, they have had to attend 26 sometimes very long hearings, and listen to and dissect thousands of pages of testimony focusing on details and information that any normal human could scarcely nail down. All in response to a prestigious applicant, Valley Hospital, and its application for a master plan amendment that would allow its near-doubling of size at its location at South Van Dien Avenue next to the Benjamin Franklin Middle School.
It has become evident through this process that there are many different ways to slice and dice the data. By that, I mean a litany of measurements such as square footage, lot coverage, floor area ratios, shadow lines, changes of buffers, heights and setbacks at various sections of the buildings and property. Moreover, the board members have needed to distinguish each of these measures according to the current 2014 expansion proposal, the former 2010 proposal and what exists today. Add differing testimony on hospital beds needed, numbers and types of trucks during specific years and stages of construction, possible impact on child safety and schools, and a magnitude of other information – most importantly village character.
If I were a Planning Board member, I would see three things through all these nights.
1. Land use is primary as the basis of a master plan change.
2. As a key burden of proof, the applicant for the master plan change has not substantiated why it is absolutely necessary to conduct this degree of expansion on its main hospital campus. Valley affirms that this scale of expansion, at its current location, is the only way to well serve both our village and region, and that it is cost-prohibitive to relocate additional services, re-think its bed counts here, or follow other paths to modernize – based on elements of a business plan that it chooses not to make clear.
3. There is more than enough reason to believe that the detriments of this permanent change to our village outweigh the positives, and that the hospital has not made a convincing case to the contrary.
– See more at: https://www.northjersey.com/opinion/opinion-letters-to-the-editor/letter-planning-board-members-have-much-to-consider-1.1034646#sthash.6Qg61KBE.dpuf
JUNE 12, 2014 LAST UPDATED: THURSDAY, JUNE 12, 2014, 5:43 PM Melinda Wagner
To the editor:
When my husband and I began attending Planning Board meetings years ago, we were deeply annoyed with Valley Hospital, whose officials had already drawn up elaborate plans to double in size while neglecting to consult the taxpayers who would have to endure years of construction, and its permanent aftermath (to date, residents have yet to be consulted).
More than eight years later – after countless meetings, thousands of dollars, and numerous, stressful hours, my family is no longer annoyed. We are furious!
Valley wants to place a structure the size of Paramus Park Mall in the middle of a neighborhood of single-family homes, three schools, and playing fields – an area traversed by many hundreds of children daily. In order to get their way, Valley officials have spun, sliced and diced the “facts,” treated residents with disrespect, and have consistently failed to address the matter at hand. It is this last point that I find most infuriating. Indeed, every single argument in support of this gargantuan project has been specious, beside the point, and misleading – no matter how compelling, heartwarming or dire.
Reader says It does not take much to turn a real estate market and we are likely on the tipping point.
Perhaps the most interesting indication of this is the No Valley and No Apartment signs that appear on the lawns of houses that have recently sold to young families moving into town. They came here for the schools and the neighborhood feel of the town. Then, they learn that what they just bought into is under the threat of the massive hospital and apartment complexes. Having just sunk their young fortunes into new homes, they are justifiably worried.
Think now of what happens if that worry becomes known to those currently looking. Through this blog, for instance, or newspaper coverage of the planning board hearings or letters to the editors. Real estate can very quickly take a nose dive in Ridgewood when towns in close proximity offer almost as much without the looming risk.
If you were 30-35 again, with two young children and enough money to buy a house in Ridgewood, and there was a chance Ridgewood was going to turn into something more along the lines of the hustle and bustle found in a small city sometime in the next 5 to 10 years, would you risk your hard earned down payment money on Ridgewood property? And for those of us in the 45 to 55 range, on the verge of being empty nesters, do we risk riding the property market to the bottom when we can cash out now?
No, make no mistake, Ridgewood is very much on a precipice formed by the intersection of a monolithic hospital concerned about its future revenue stream, developers who want to increase their profits and well meaning Villagers who are buying into false arguments and fears generated by the Hospital and developers.
file photo by Maura McMahon DeNicola in Ridgewood PJ Blogger with Joe Kyrillos
Post-CA Tenure Decision, Kyrillos Seeks Repeat in New Jersey Jun. 11 Education, Joe Kyrillos, National, Uncategorized 1 comment
By Matt Rooney | The Save Jersey Blog
Joe Kyrillos at 2012 RNC in Tampa, Florida
Following an earth-shattering decision by the California state court striking down that state’s tenure law, state Senator Joe Kyrillos (R-Monmouth) says he’s reaching out to an advocacy group involved in the West Coast case to help accomplish the same result in New Jersey.
He’ll start by re-introducing S-2171, “The School Children First Act.”
“This legislature should seize this opportunity and momentum to pass full tenure reform to improve education and lower property taxes in New Jersey,” Sen. Kyrillos said in a statement released by the Senate GOP office. “This overhaul bill allows public school districts to best serve their students and communities by ensuring only the best teachers, administrators and staff members are the ones educating and nurturing our next generation.”
Past efforts have been examples of tokenism at best and a waste of time for the more cynical among you.
Kyrillos says his legislation would accomplish the following:
· Eliminate last-in, first-out (LIFO) seniority protections that force schools to ignore educator effectiveness and layoff high-performing younger teachers, instead of more expensive, ineffective ones;
· Require school districts to adopt merit-based compensation schedules, whereby public school employees are paid and retained based on their performances, contributions and growth;
· Allow school principals to assign teachers to classrooms where they will be effective; and
· Alleviate tenure-law obstacles for school districts seeking to become more efficient by consolidating or merging services.
It’s a tough issue, Save Jerseyans.
Why? Because it’s easy enough to say “let’s reward good teachers and reform/penalize the bad ones,” but how do you effectively evaluate teacher performance when the good teachers find their classrooms filled with the most challenging students on an annual basis?
There’s also an emerging consensus among everyone NOT in government that testing is close to useless.
School choice is the only solution. The free market is the only fair way to judge any professional’s abilities. Anything else is probably a net negative for hardworking teachers and a net neutral for the kids we’re trying to help. Just one former student’s opinion…
Why I’m pulling my kids out of public school By Lynne Rigby Sunday, June 8, 2014 6:21pm
Lynne Rigby with her husband and five children. “Today’s public school atmosphere is all about accountability and not about the actual needs of the child,’’ she writes in her open letter to Gov. Rick Scott and school officials. “Not everything in education can be quantified.’’ Lynne Rigby photo
Editor’s note: More than 150,000 people have read a posting byLynne Rigby, a 40-year-old Seminole County mother of five children, on her website, lynnerigby.com. Rigby, a former teacher, addressed it to Gov, Rick Scott and Seminole school officials. The following is a condensed version.
I am a parent of five children in Seminole County schools, aged 4 to 16. My husband and I are deeply embedded in this community. We are both successful products of Lake Brantley High School. I graduated from the University of Georgia in 1995 and came back to Seminole to teach kindergarten; he is currently the pitching coach for the Lake Brantley varsity baseball team. We stayed here so our kids would be blessed with a similar educational experience.
This year has been completely disheartening for us. You see, I’ve been okay with FCAT … show what you know, I get it … some sort of accountability. That was until this year. My third-grade son, Jackson, has had mostly As, a scattering of Bs through his Bear Lake Elementary career, much like his brothers. However, he has had the Discovery Education tests added to his school year. I saw his score on DE in first grade and it was scary low, in the 20s. But his teacher said he was doing fine. Same thing in 2nd grade, though knowing that FCAT was looming, I began to panic a bit.
We read out loud together each night through the summer, talked about the books as we read, and I believed that would pay off on the first DE test of third grade because he was doing really well. I was wrong. His first DE test was similar to others, but now his teachers started panicking because their pay depends on it. He was sent to remedial LEAP and ultimately a math pullout group. All the while he has had mostly As and a few Bs.
Disconnect. That’s the word that plays over in my head. How can he do all his homework on his own, never struggling with any topic and get such a low percentile on a test? Then, an epiphany. What is the validity of this test? How does it relate to our curriculum?
JUNE 10, 2014, 5:17 PM LAST UPDATED: TUESDAY, JUNE 10, 2014, 5:17 PM BY CHRISTOPHER DE VINCK THE RECORD
Christopher de Vinck is the language arts supervisor at Clifton High School in New Jersey. His 13th book is “Moments of Grace” (Paulist Press).
LET’S CREATE a national program called “No Child Left behind,” and flood the schools with standardized tests. Let’s change the name and call it “Race to the Top.” Let’s put kids in uniforms. Let’s increase the school day. Let’s pay teachers less money. Let’s pay teachers more money. Let’s create charter schools. Let’s create schools just for boys. Let’s create schools just for girls. Let’s have kids pray in school. Let’s create common core standards. Let’s blame the college teacher-education programs. Let’s blame the teachers. Let’s blame the parents. Let’s give the governors and the business community the keys to the schools. Let’s flood the schools with technology. Let’s call schools boring. Let’s blame the curriculum.
Don’t you see how foolish we have been? Don’t you see that all of these initiatives are focused on the politics of education and not education? Don’t you realize that none of these attempts has made any difference in the education of children for the past 40 years?
Based on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (the nation’s report card), the average reading scores for 17-year-olds today is not significantly different from the scores in 1971.
For the past 43 years our nation has been dodging the real reasons why our system of education has been stagnant.
Two attempted child luring incidents reported in Bergen County
JUNE 7, 2014, 3:31 PM LAST UPDATED: SATURDAY, JUNE 7, 2014, 3:35 PM BY AARON MORRISON STAFF WRITER THE RECORD
Authorities in two Bergen County towns were dealing with reports of attempted child luring Saturday.
In Elmwood Park, a 10-year-old girl told police Saturday morning that a man driving a red sedan asked if she needed a ride. When she refused the offer, the man yelled at the girl and he sped off, said Sgt. Ralph Sigona of the Elmwood Park police. Detectives were reviewing security footage from a building near where the alleged luring attempt took place, added Sigona, who did not release the location of the incident.
Tenafly Schools Superintendent Lynn Trager described a similar incident, reported to police Friday evening, near the Stillman Elementary playground at Windsor and Tenafly roads. A student was approached by an “older teenager with short hair” at approximately 9:30 p.m.
The teen asked the girl to come with him, but she ran away and informed an adult, Trager wrote in an alert sent to parents.
JUNE 6, 2014 LAST UPDATED: FRIDAY, JUNE 6, 2014, 12:31 AM PAGES: 1 2 > DISPLAY ON ONE PAGE
Concerns about hospital proposal Marcia Ringel
To the editor:
At two recent Planning Board meetings, residents were invited to share their concerns about Valley Hospital’s expansion proposal. This letter roughly reiterates my statement on May 20.
A child says, “I want a pony.” The parent says, “How about a puppy — or a guppy?”
Child’s counteroffer: “How about a slightly smaller pony with setbacks and an above-ground parking lot?”
The family doesn’t spend eight years discussing where a horse could be stabled or what it would eat. Just: “No pony.”
Valley Hospital’s revised proposal is a slightly smaller pony.
In the past 42 years I have entered Valley as an inpatient, outpatient, parent and visitor. But Valley feels less caring to me now. Our community has been treated with contempt by our community hospital, marketing madly with millions saved in taxes on the backs of this community. What began as David and Goliath morphed into David and Godzilla.
I feel perplexed as my neighbors must repeatedly remind our elected and appointed officials that we love our village, begging them not to destroy it in the name of progress or for fear of litigation.
I feel alarmed that almost every year a new group of residents has felt compelled to band together to protest the handing over of our public lands and space.
I feel betrayed by our Board of Education, who wimped out when they should have spoken out.
I feel dismayed that this issue has overshadowed five council elections.
Ridgewood neighborhoods are adjacent to schools, fields, parks, shops and a hospital. We lived in harmony for many years. That delicate balance must return.
Several decades ago the late Barney Van Dyk told me that he wanted to include indoor seating in his ice cream store, nestled among homes on Ackerman Avenue. But he graciously accepted the zoning board’s refusal, understanding that zoning laws protect residents. Ice cream is still eaten in the parking lot.
We have no dearth of fine hospitals. Even New York is coming: Memorial Sloan-Kettering in Basking Ridge and in the fall, physicians’ offices in Paramus for the Hospital for Special Surgery.
Village Planner Blais Brancheau’s recent report said Phase 2 of the hospital expansion might not happen. Of course it would, as would Phase 3, causing decades of unstoppable derangement — a tax-exempt Juggernaut that no wall, buffer or traffic island could mitigate.
– See more at: https://www.northjersey.com/opinion/opinion-letters-to-the-editor/letter-concerns-about-hospital-proposal-1.1030466#sthash.qhqYB8WM.dpuf
Ridgewood council to vote on changes to Garber Square road project
JUNE 5, 2014 LAST UPDATED: THURSDAY, JUNE 5, 2014, 3:37 PM BY BY DARIUS AMOS STAFF WRITER
Ridgewood Council members this week offered their preliminary support of recommended changes to the controversial Garber Square improvement project, and their decision will be official when they vote on a village resolution June 11.
Resident protest and input over the past three weeks prompted municipal officials to revisit the plans, which call for the installation of a bicycle lane in each direction of Garber Square from the train underpass to West Ridgewood Avenue. To accommodate the bike lanes, a majority of Garber Square was reduced to one motor vehicle lane for each direction of traffic.
Though the village will continue that portion of the project, officials have agreed to reduce the width of the median separating easterly and westerly traffic from 8 feet to 4 feet. A smaller median gives the village “flexibility” in the event engineering officials opt to reinstate the second traffic lane and eliminate the bike path, according to Village Manager Roberta Sonenfeld.
“It’s a fallback if congestion that is untreatable does occur,” Sonenfeld said at Wednesday’s council work session. “We’re not trying to cause congestion, but we’re trying to slow down traffic.”
Half of Americans can’t afford their house June 3, 2014, 1:58 p.m. EDT
Over half of Americans (52%) have had to make at least one major sacrifice in order to cover their rent or mortgage over the last three years, according to the “How Housing Matters Survey,” which was commissioned by the nonprofit John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and carried out by Hart Research Associates. These sacrifices include getting a second job, deferring saving for retirement, cutting back on health care, running up credit card debt, or even moving to a less safe neighborhood or one with worse schools.“Affordability issues are real and a major hurdle,” says Lawrence Yun, chief economist at the National Association of Realtors, an industry group. Home prices have increased 20% over the past two years while wages have barely gone up, he says. “Only by adding more new supply, via housing starts, can home prices be tamed,” Yun adds. In fact, construction of housing units has averaged around 1.5 million a year for the past five decades, he says, but it’s likely to be less than 1 million in 2014.
What’s more, at least 15% of American homeowners (or residents of 78 counties across the country) were living in housing markets where the monthly mortgage payment on a median-priced home requires more than 30% of the monthly median household income — long considered the maximum for rent/mortgage repayments. Housing costs above that threshold are “unaffordable by historic standards,” says Daren Blomquist, vice president at real estate data firm RealtyTrac. In New York county/Manhattan, mortgage payments represent 77% of the median income and in San Francisco County represents 70%.
Piling On: More New Research Shows No Link Between “Polar Vortex” and Global Warming MAY 29, 2014 1:27PM By PAUL C. “CHIP” KNAPPENBERGER and PATRICK J. MICHAELS
Global Science Report is a feature from the Center for the Study of Science, where we highlight one or two important new items in the scientific literature or the popular media. For broader and more technical perspectives, consult our monthly “Current Wisdom.”
This is getting embarrassing.
Another scientific paper has just been published that again finds no association between Arctic sea ice loss and extreme cold and wintery conditions across the U.S.—White House Science Advisor John Holdren’s favorite mechanism for tying last winter’s persistent “polar vortex” over the eastern US to anthropogenic global warming (AGW).
We wonder just what it will take for the White House to publicly admit that it was grossly wrong. At the very least, it needs to disavow a widely-disseminated YouTube video featuring Holdren explaining the link between last winter’s polar vortex and human-caused climate change. There is no such link. Of course, this won’t happen, as Holdren was simply engaging in a publicity stunt relying on tenuous science to scare up support for President Obama’s Climate Action Plan. The President is hell-bent on an endless string of executive actions aimed at manipulating the energy market and reducing our energy choices along the way.
As we reported when the video was first released last January, the science linking human-caused climate change to the southward excursions of the polar vortex was a stretch to begin with. It was then dealt a major blow by a study led by Colorado State climate researcher Elizabeth Barnes that was coincidentally published a few days after Holdren’s YouTube video. Barnes’s found that natural variability dominates the observed record, making it impossible to detect any human-caused global warming signal even if one were to exist in the vortex data (which there is no proof of). Shortly after that, a collection of very prominent climate scientists specializing in research into atmospheric circulation patterns wrote a letter to a prominent journal stating that drawing the type of connection that Holdren did was not scientifically advisable
Spurred by all of this, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) sent apetition to the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy (OSTP) to force Holdren issue a correction under the terms of the Data Quality Act. According to CEI, “OSTP guidelines require the agency to correct any published information that does not meet ‘basic standards of quality, including objectivity, utility, and integrity.’”
Holdren and the White House have been unmoved.
Now comes this: a brand new study, led by Thomas Ballinger of Kent State University, which directly examined the size and magnitude of the 2014 “polar vortex” event and found it to be not particularly unusual. Yes, it was a significant event ushering a lot of really cold air southward over the eastern 2/3rds of the U.S. and bringing with it all sorts of winter misery, but it wasn’t historically unusual. In fact, Ballinger’s team, found, in examining polar vortex behavior across North America since 1948, that the 2014 polar vortex excursion into the lower 48 ranked 6th in southerly extent and 7th in total area. The authors concluded that their analysis “revealed that the spatial features of the January 2014 [polar vortex over the U.S.] were not extreme relative to certain 1948-2013 Januaries.”
Ballinger and colleagues took their analysis one step further and examined the historical record to see if they could find a link between the loss of Arctic sea ice and an increase in polar vortex excursions into the U.S.—Holdren’s favored explanation for tying human actions into their own winter suffering. Here is what they wrote:
While this [polar vortex] study solely examines January, a regional domain, and uses different data to quantify atmospheric circulation, the results presented here are not congruent with the large-scale flow changes suggested in those latter papers [linking Arctic sea ice loss to polar vortex behavior].
Sorry, John.
So with a large and growing body of scientists and scientific evidence aligning against Holdren’s explanation of things, it is high time for a recognition of this by the White House. But since they are no doubt too focused on pushing their new carbon dioxide emissions regulations to find the time to insure that their justification for the regulations are based in fact, we thought we’d help them out and draft a public announcement for them. Here is what we have come up with:
From the White House:
We’d like to take this opportunity to correct something that we put forward regarding human-caused climate change and the polar vortex from this past winter. In actuality, and as a collection of new science has shown, that linkage is much more tenuous that we stated, if it even exists at all.
Our purpose for releasing that video and associated press material was to take advantage of an extreme weather event that was inconveniencing a large number of Americans. We wanted to use the opportunity to try to scare you into supporting our executive actions aimed at restricting carbon dioxide emissions in an effort to mitigate future climate change. Admittedly, the science is much weaker than federal pronouncements like these make it out to be. But if we were forthcoming with all the data and the complete story that it told, there would be even less support for the Climate Action Plan than currently exists. And since we’re coming clean about things, we’ll go ahead and admit that we realize the regulations forwarded under the Climate Action Plan, most notably the soon-to-be-announced sweeping carbon dioxide emissions restrictions on existing power plants, will have no measureable impact on the very thing that they aim to achieve—mitigating climate change—unless, by eliminating coal-fired electricity generation, there is a technological miracle that no one can anticipate or forecast. While waiting, you’ll just have to live with more expensive electricity.
We really aren’t very concerned about this because one of the confident predictions from government scientists is that winters should warm preferentially to summers. So you won’t need as much electricity to heat your house. If we were right about the polar vortex and very cold temperatures in the East, that would be too bad, but we were wrong.
So, next time you hear a federal pronouncement about climate change and extreme weather (likely coming sometime this summer when it gets hot), note that we are largely making it up and that the larger body of science, economics, and statistics, generally doesn’t support our wild assertions.
We’ll let you know when our phone rings.
References:
Ballinger, T., M.J. Allen, and R.V. Rohli, 2014. Spatiotemporal analysis of the January Northern Hemisphere circumpolar vortex over the contiguous United States. Geophysical Research Letters,doi:10.1002/2014GL060285.
Barnes, E., et al., 2014. Exploring recent trends in Northern Hemisphere blocking. Geophysical Research Letters, doi:10.1002/2013GL058745.
Kids Reject Michelle Obama’s “Healthy” School Lunches Tiffiny Ruegner May 24, 2014
Michelle Obama’s new dietary restrictions is so bad that they can’t even GIVE the food away. A million kids have turned away from Obama’s school lunch and schools are feeling the huge hit.
Via The Hill:
More than a million kids confronted by healthier school lunches are turning up their noses, leaving the cafeteria and heading out to get a burger instead.
The difficulty in getting students to eat lower-fat, lower-sodium meals is at the center of a food fight between House Republicans and first lady Michelle Obama that erupted this week.
The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, supported by President Obama, requires lunch programs that receive federal dollars to provide healthier meals. The new standards began to go into effect in 2012. Childhood obesity has spiraled in recent decades, and the first lady has made the fight against it a signature issue. Democrats say stemming the epidemic will cut healthcare costs and keep the armed forces functioning.
But Agriculture Department statistics show the number of school children in the National School Lunch Program dropped from 31.8 million in 2011 to 30.7 million in 2013. School boards are asking Congress to allow schools to opt out. Some schools are raiding their teaching budgets to cover the costs of mounds of wasted fruits and vegetables, Lucy Gettman of the National School Boards Association said.
The dietary restrictions have not actually made the food healthier. They have cut down the amount of food to cut calories which has also cut nutrients to the growing generation. When a body doesn’t have enough nutrients… it craves food more. Give us 10 years and you will see this denying kids food will have exacerbated the obesity problem. What they really needed to do was increase the amount of fresh non packaged food and either increased the food cost or encouraged volunteers over paid employees in the cafeterias for food prep to balance the extra cost for quality food.
LIBERTYVILLE, Ill. – On Tuesday, May 13, the Northern Illinois Patriots , President Greg Clements, sponsored Dr. Duke Pesta, Freedom Project Education Academy Director — an online school offering a complete classical education for students from Kindergarten through High School, free from public school spin and Common Core indoctrination — as its featured speaker at Austin’s Saloon and Eatery, 481 Peterson Road in Libertyville. Dr. Pesta’s topic: “Common Core: Dangers and Threats.”
As a teacher himself, Dr. Pesta is not anti-teacher despite his negative opinion of Common Core. If truth be told, many teachers oppose Common Core but are told to keep quiet or lose their jobs. Pesta received his MA in Renaissance literature from John Carroll University and his Ph.D. in Shakespeare and Renaissance literature from Purdue University.
He has taught at major research institutions and small liberal arts colleges, and has been active in education reform, developing and implementing an elective Bible course that is currently available for public high school students in Texas. Currently he is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh in addition to his role as Academic Director of Freedom Project Education.
The chilling truth behind the new national standards are sure to terrify you, as they did to those who attended the Northern Illinois Patriots event. A question Dr Pesta asks at the beginning of each of his events is how many are familiar with Common Core? As is the case most often, 90 to 95% are still foggy about the nature of Common Core.
Dr. Duke Pesta, using research done by others, presented Common Core as the drive it is toward complete government control of our children’s education through a series a slides and commentary titled, “Common Core: Dangers and Threats.” Dr. Pesta considers Common Core a hugely bi-partisan problem. In Wisconsin Republicans refused to allow a vote to be held on Common Core legislation. Nationally, Jeb Bush and Chris Christie are in total support of Common Core, as is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Dr. Duke Pesta divided his presentation into three parts
Part 1: How did Common Core come about? a Research Fellow in Education at the Heartland Institute
Common Core State Standards (CCSS) implies that that all states were consulted before they signed on to Common Core, as though it were a democratic thing instead of Banana Republic tactics. Not so! Joy Pullman, a Research Fellow in Education at the Heartland Institute, traces the writing of Common Core back to five individuals. One of its writers, David Coleman is considered the chief architect of Common Core. According to Dr. Pesta, Coleman is not qualified to write on any subject. Worrisome is that Coleman has since moved on to become president of the College Board where he will integrate the AP assessments with Common Core standards.
Hence, the curriculum was written by a small group of individuals and then copyrighted by two Washington lobbyist groups, making it devoid of any government ownership. This is important because the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Acts was the first federal attempt to regulate and finance schools. In 1979 the law that created the Department of Education forbids it to exercise “any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum” or “program of instruction” of any school system. The mechanism of control were the tests all students had to take to be written by the people who created Common Core. To pass the tests, the Common Core curriculum had to be taught. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation donated $170 million to support the creation and implementation of Common Core State Standards. To date they have contributed $2.5 billion.
But there is no way Common Core could have been brought into the nation’s schools given that it was the product of a small group of activists supported by billionaire Bill Gates. As background, in 2001, President G.W. Bush came up with “No Child Left Behind” which he gave over to Senator Ted Kennedy to write. “No Child Left Behind” was a disaster from the beginning as it was based on “outcome” education, which is akin to socialism. Every single child was expected to meet the same arbitrary standard through high stakes testing.
Fast forward to 2009. President Obama is now in office. It was in 2009 that President Obama took $5.1 billion of taxpayer money and offered it to states to sign on to his “Race to the Top” program. The catch: If states accepted “Race to the Top” money they had to accept Common Core State Standards (CSSS) sight unseen. Additionally, a waiver was granted to states so they could opt out of Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” program if they signed on to Obama’s” Race to the Top” program.
Forty-four states agreed to trade their K-12 math and English targets and tests for those of the Common Core’s State Standards yet to be written. Now that CC is in place, in some states longer than others, Dr. Pesta looks upon Common Core as “No Child Left Behind of steroids.” He also refers to Common Core as a social justice curriculum that comes before the ABC’s. Remaining at its core is a one-size fits all definition of education. But what if the high standards can’t be met? It becomes obvious that the only way to get more children to the same place is in time to lower standards.
Part 2: Nature of Common Core Curriculum
Although it is often said that Common Core is not a curriculum but a set of standards, Common Core standards are being put into textbooks which then become curriculum. Pierson, as the largest education product sales company on earth, has a monopoly on education products, including textbooks. This month Bill Gates — the second richest man on earth who almost single-handedly funded and marketed the entire Common Core movement going back to UNESCO and its goal to bring a master curriculum worldwide – has joined forces with Pearson to create a one size fits all curriculum. Although it is claimed that states can deviate 15% from what is being taught in other states, if this were true there would have to be a different test for each state.
Dr. James Milgram, professor of mathematics at Stanford University, and Dr. Sandra Stotsky, professor emerita at the University of Arkansas and former Senior Associate Commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Education, as members of the Common Core Validation Review Panel were the only experts on the panel in their subject area. Both Milgram a math expert and Stotsky an English expert refused to give Common Core Math and English standards, respectively, a good recommendation as did the rest of the panel. Both have gone on to testify with a warning voice to state legislatures and school boards about the inadequacy of the standards.
Hear Dr. Milgram talk about “What happened to Math education and why Common Core won’t help.”
James Milgram points out these flaws of the new Core Curriculum math standards:
By the end of fifth grade the material being covered in arithmetic and algebra in Core Standards is more than a year behind the early grade expectations in most high achieving countries. By the end of seventh grade Core Standards are roughly two years behind. Core Mathematics Standards are written to reflect very low expectations and do not reflect the mathematics education that underlie the results in the high achieving countries. The explicitly stated objective is to prepare students not to have to take remedial mathematics courses at a typical community college.
Common Core applies a never before seen methodology in the way common math problems are solved. Parents can no longer help their children with simple addition and subtraction not understanding the system. Staking of numbers is no longer permitted, instead children must draw dots, circles, squares, etc., to come up with the answer.
Dr. Pesta used as a demonstration a Champion News video of a Grayslake D46 Curriculum Coordinator relating how under the new Common Core math system if a child determines that 3 + 4 is 11, that’s perfectly fine if the child is able to explain how he arrived at the answer. Even if a child can do math beyond his grade level, he must stay put and not try to move to a higher level.
Dr. Sandra Stotsky has come to refer to Common Core standards as propaganda. Hear Dr. Sandra Stotsky describe “What are the major problems with Common Core English Standards?”
Dr. Stotsky’s concerns about Common Core can be read here.
Common Core is a step backwards for English Standards. The architects of Common Core’s English Language Arts standards never claimed that their standards would do so; rather, they claimed the standards would make all students “college-ready,” Common Core English standards require English teachers to emphasize skills, not literary or cultural knowledge, such as how and why individuals, events, and ideas develop and interact over the course of a text at all grade levels, which may lead to a decreased capacity for analytical thinking. Common Core standards require English teachers to teach “informational” texts over 50% of their reading instructional time rather than literary texts. There are, however, 30 books sexually unfit for high school kids to read on the Common Core approved reading list, one such book for the 11th grade: The Bluest Eye. Writing is emphasized more than reading, but kids only learn to write well after they can read well. When writing they will most likely write what they read in their textbooks such as the global warming, threat, ways to save the planet, or a denial of American exceptionalism.
Here is Dr. Pesta’s anti-Common Core Speech similar to the one he presented at Austin’s on Tuesday, May 13.
Article 2: “Shocking Far Reaching Tentacles of Common Core” as referenced in 3rd part of Dr. Peta’s presentation on Common Core sponsored by Northern Illinois Patriots Tuesday, May 13.
Authored by Nancy Thorner at Illinois Review https://eagnews.org/thorner-chilling-truth-behind-common-core-state-standards/
ILLINOIS REVIEW
Founded in 2005, Illinois Review is a digital media site, providing an alternative perspective and source of Illinois news and information.
Booker preparing for fight to keep his Senate seat
MAY 25, 2014, 10:45 PM LAST UPDATED: SUNDAY, MAY 25, 2014, 10:46 PM BY HERB JACKSON RECORD COLUMNIST THE RECORD
Maybe it’s the positive thoughts he pushes out at least daily on Facebook and Twitter, but Sen. Cory Booker says he’s more optimistic about finding bipartisan solutions in Washington than he was when he arrived seven months ago.
“I came down here with low expectations and my experience is better and better and better,” Booker said in an interview last week, ticking off bipartisan bills to expand apprenticeships and study year-round schools, and touting his solo plan that could lead to other states’ contributing toward future New Jersey highway projects.
But while Booker’s enthusiasm grew for his new job, the rock-star image he built in his previous job as the mayor who turned Newark around is taking a hit.
This month’s intensely competitive campaign to choose his replacement as Newark mayor highlighted a $30 million shortfall in the city budget Booker left. The winner of that campaign, Ras Baraka, was a city councilman and public school principal who frequently criticized the Booker school reform plan that attracted a $100 million donation from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, but produced questionable results.
Booker also touted his ability to bring down crime in the city, and in 2008, the city murder rate had dropped to 67. But budget cuts after that then reduced the size of the police force to 1,038 from 1,317 last year. And there were 111 murders last year, the most in 23 years.
The state comptroller also issued a damning report in March saying that the city government was inattentive to corruption and patronage at the independent Newark Watershed Conservation and Development Corp., which had managed the city’s water delivery and reservoirs in Morris, Passaic and Sussex counties.
Among the findings referred to state prosecutors were that a Booker ally serving as the agency’s director wrote herself unauthorized payroll checks, handed out no-bid contracts to close personal associates, and made surreptitious risky investments that lost $500,000.
“I don’t think my legacy needs defending,” Booker said when asked about the bashing he has been taking. He said that he got Baraka’s endorsement for senator in the October election to fill the remainder of the late Sen. Frank Lautenberg’s term, and won 90 percent of the votes cast in Newark against Republican Steve Lonegan.
Sounding like a Union Stoge New York State Education Commissioner Says Opposing Common Core Is Racist
Via Times Union:
On the 60th anniversary of the historic Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that led to school desegregation in the U.S., State Education Commissioner John King on Wednesday spoke about the struggles that minorities and low-income students still face in the nation’s educational system.
In his remarks at the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government in Albany, King said racial and socioeconomic disparities among students have an effect on academic achievement. He said only 15 percent of black and Latino high school graduates are ready for college-level work, while half of white students are sufficiently prepared. “Equality is central to our identities as Americans,” King said. “But for all its power as an idea, equality remains elusive for far too many people of color in New York and across the country.”
King cited a study by the Civil Rights Project at the University of California at Los Angeles that named New York as home to “the most segregated public schools in the country” -— racially and economically. He said while schools are no longer overtly segregated by race, district lines often divide children along racial or socioeconomic boundaries.
“We should not be able to point to neighborhoods in New York where one public school serves mostly poor students and achieves painfully discouraging results while another public school just a few blocks away serves mostly affluent students and puts them on the path to success,” he said.
King said Common Core educational standards are an attempt to close the achievement gap between minority and low-income students relative to their peers. He urged parents and educators to not back off from their commitment to Common Core.
“This is about taking responsibility for educating every single child no matter what his or her race, background or economic status,” the commissioner said. “By retreating from accountability and allowing children at risk to slip through the cracks, advocates of lower standards deny us the talents of all Americans.”
