Secret Acts Shall Be Revealed

These scriptures came to mind as I was thinking about my writing today:

Luke 8:17  For nothing is secret, that shall not be made manifest; neither any thing hid, that shall not be known and come abroad.

Luke 12:3  Therefore whatsoever ye have spoken in darkness shall be heard in the light; and that which ye have spoken in the ear in closets shall be proclaimed upon the housetops.

Doctrine & Covenants 1:3 And the rebellious shall be pierced with much sorrow; for their iniquities shall be spoken upon the housetops, and their secret acts shall be revealed.

I’m pleased when the truth comes out. That is happening, at last, in a couple of places. One is a news story beginning to have the name Obamagate attached to it; I’m going to wait for another day for that.

Instead, I’ll start with a more local story, related to ballot security here in Texas—with lessons, hopefully, to help voters everywhere.

Last Saturday, mid-afternoon, I started seeing notices that our County Clerk, here in Harris County (where Houston is) had resigned. Diane Trautman, who was elected in November 2018, has the main responsibility of handling elections.

Diane Trautman, Harris County Clerk, until May 31, 2020
image from the HarrisVotes.org website

During her relatively short time in office, she made a number of missteps—some from inexperience, some from attitude.

There had been a lawsuit, from 2016, against the county regarding disability accessibility, which had been held off indefinitely by the previous county clerk, Stan Stanart—because there was not a single case of discrimination brought as evidence. No individual had been affected; some activists just went around and speculated where a problem might have been possible, and sued based on that. County Clerk Trautman decided to settle the lawsuit—costing the county taxpayers about a couple million dollars, and requiring hours and hours of tedious training for absolutely every poll worker, regardless of previous experience, regardless of lack of issues at their polling places—but the poll workers were paid for this training, again at county taxpayer expense.

The training could have been done in five minutes: “Remember to treat everyone with respect and courtesy. And if your polling place has issues that need remediation, we provide materials and instructions when you pick up your voting materials.” Done.

The hours and hours of training didn’t totally replace voting judge training, but did replace other poll worker training, including bilingual training.

Also, even though there was an election in November, we were required to get training again (this time shorter and online) before the primary election—after which we learned that we only need the training no more than annually. So, another error at county expense and poll worker inconvenience.

The only change at our polling place was the use of a call buzzer for curbside voting. In November it didn’t work, so we just went back to the usual protocol, having a poll worker watching outside to address needs. While I have seen curbside voting used at a location where I was a poll watcher, we have never, in all our years of running elections at our precinct’s polling place, had a request for curbside. But we were provided a temperamental machine, just in case—plus a technician to make sure it works, or to pack it away if it doesn’t—paid for by the county taxpayers.

Trautman changed the county website quite drastically, from one that worked well and was easy to navigate to one that was quite glorifying of her but was difficult to use. I had occasion to help a friend update her voter registration after a move to a nursing home, which also included needing to change the address on her ID. This involved a phonecall to someone in a state office to help us iron out some detail—because we hadn’t been able to get what we needed on the county website. He tried using the site himself and said, “What have they done to this website? It didn’t used to be this difficult.” So, it’s not just me.

She instituted countywide voting—which has been quite popular for voters, but less so for poll workers, who tend to be people from their own precinct. She tried to cut out precinct chairs from their role of providing judges and workers, so that all would be hired directly by the county for their personal list. They also tried (mostly unsuccessfully because of Republican Party intervention) to eliminate polling places, further cutting off precinct chairs from their ability to reach their voters. And she vowed to throw out the very safe and successful Hart e-Slate voting system, with the new and more secure e-poll books (a tablet dedicated to the purpose), and return to paper only—at the expense of several million dollars and reintroducing many old fraud practices inherent in paper only ballots. So far she hasn’t been successful at this. Also, her system has failed repeatedly to meet requirements for updating in time to prevent a second vote by the same voter, which means it makes in-person voter fraud possible in ways it wasn't before.

Her first night of polling, returning tallies was disastrous. It took more than all night to tally, because she had failed to follow the practices of her predecessor, and thought she’d just send results over an insecure internet line—even though the state had warned her repeatedly that this would not be allowed. So she gathered the tallies from the various locations in person, rather than give an unofficial count by phone followed by a (hopefully matching) official count after everything arrived at the central location and was verified.

For the Primary, the parties gave her estimates for voting machine needs at the various polling places, based on previous elections. But she decided that every polling location needed the same number for each party. So in some heavily Democrat areas, Republicans were given far more machines than they had requested, and Democrats had extremely long lines. Because of countywide voting, locations were harder to predict, and she was afraid of backlash for not being equitable to both parties. Instead, the backlash was from angry mostly Democrats, with Republicans rolling their eyes and trying not to speak aloud, “I told you so.”

Anyway, all of this is to say—hurray! She’s stepping down.

Why is she stepping down just a little over a year into a 4-year term? She says it’s because of her age and the Covid-19 threat. From her statement:

After much deliberation and discussion with my family and physician, I am resigning from my position as Harris County Clerk due to personal health concerns. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, my age, and underlying health issues, I do not feel I can safely continue to carry out my duties as Harris County Clerk.

I was surprised to learn she is 70; she appears younger. But this comes among more than a pandemic.

She has been pushing for mail-in ballots for all upcoming elections—particularly the primary runoff election, which was postponed until July, and then the presidential general election in November.

There’s a problem with mail-in ballots: getting proof that the person voting is the person entitled to the ballot. The only security Texas has so far is a signature comparison between the application for mail-in ballot and the signature attached to the ballot when it comes in. Someone (of both parties?) has to visually examine each signature to determine if it appears likely that the same person signed both. If there’s a question, then signatures going back several years can be compared. But this is often difficult to determine. And, unless there’s an additional reason to question a ballot, it’s usually just accepted and counted. Once the paper ballot is separated from the envelope it came from, there is no retrieving it. And, as with other paper ballot systems, this is how an additional couple hundred ballots just happen to get added to the stack.

Trautman planned to send ballots, unrequested, to every voter age 65+ in the county. That would mean no original signature to compare to when the ballot was returned. The only security measure would be eliminated.

There’s been a particular problem with ballot harvesting in nursing homes. Activists request ballots for voters at nursing homes—with or without permission of the residents—and they can receive, fill out, and return those ballots sometimes without the residents even seeing their own ballot, possibly not even knowing it was being done in their name. The only way to prevent this fraud is to compare signatures—but, beyond that, to compare multiple signatures from the same place, because, examined individually, since the deceptive activist would have signed both, application and ballot signatures would technically match.

If the same writing style happens to appear on many at the same location, that’s an indicator of fraud.

But who’s going to do that work?

It turns out Colleen Vera is the person.

Colleen Vera's blog, where she detailed her findings
April 22, 2020

She has spent the last two years digging into ballot harvesting in the Harris County. That was her goal, and she was finding it. But she found much more.

She found, for example, a location where it was being done, and the persons requesting the ballots were from a particular consulting company—in other words a name to hide the harvesters names— paid out of campaign funds by, among others, Diane Trautman.

And there’s more. The ballot harvesters in at least three cases were convicted forgers. Forgers being paid to write signatures. What could go wrong?

Other officials who had paid for forgers? US Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, a Justice of the Peace and several District Judges, a Constable, and a Harris County Board Trustee. Vera points out that, while she names names, people are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

She details her investigation—with plenty of visual evidence—in her blog, Texas Trash Talk, posted April 22, 2020. It’s thorough, and lays out the evidence and what it means, ready for easy prosecution.

32 handwritten applications for mail-in ballots,
all from different voters, but in the same handwriting.
One of the pieces of evidence Colleen Vera dug up
and presented in her Texas Trash Talk post April 22, 2020

She ends her piece with this:

As a citizen there isn’t much we can do. Texas does not allow us to challenge other voter’s signatures or ballots.  All we can do is:

1. Send a complaint to the Secretary of State and hope (s)he sends it on to the Attorney General for investigation. (Which I’ve already done with this research.)

2. Contact our legislators and insist they tighten security for ballot by mail.

3.  Pray the Democrats don’t succeed in using the courts to expand our currently flawed vote by mail system.

Colleen’s husband, Alan Vera, is our Harris County Republican Party ballot security expert. He helped found True the Vote, and has trained people across the country so other states can improve their ballot security. (He trained me as a poll watcher almost a decade ago.) And he lobbies our legislature for improvements. They’re a handy couple to have on our side.

After Trautman’s resignation the other day, Alan posted this timeline on Facebook:

4/15/20: Colleen Vera files a complaint with the Texas Secretary of State regarding mail ballot harvesting in Harris County. Among the evidence submitted are payments by Dr. Trautman’s campaign directly to a convicted forger.

4/22/20: Colleen Vera publishes her evidence of Harris County ballot harvesting in her blog Texas Trash Talk (www.texastrashtalk.com) The Trautman evidence is included.

4/28/20: Commissioners Court approves $12 Million for Dr Trautman to use to expand mail ballot voting in both the Primary Runoff and the November general election. The budget includes money to send mail ballot applications to every 65+ voter in Harris County.

5/1/20: Texas Attorney General Paxton sends a letter to all Texas county judges and election authorities warning them not to mislead voters about using fear of Covid-19 as a “disability” to vote by mail[i]. His press release on that letter calls out Dr. Trautman and Judge Hidalgo specifically for crossing that line. AG Paxton states that criminal charges could result.

5/4/20 to 5/7/20: Dr. Trautman tries to get “guidance” from the Texas Secretary of State on how to carry out the mass mailing of mail ballot applications without crossing the line laid down by AG Paxton. Reportedly, the SOS does not respond to Dr. Trautman’s requests.

5/7/20: The Texas SOS notifies Colleen Vera that he has found sufficient merit in her ballot harvesting complaint to forward it to the Texas Attorney General with a recommendation to investigate the allegations.

5/7/20: Reporting that she has not received a response from the SOS, in a Zoom conference planning the 7/14/20 Primary Runoff election, Dr. Trautman announces that she will NOT mail absentee ballot applications to every 65+ voter in Harris County. Harris County Democrat Party representatives in the conference demand to know why. Dr. Trautman says she won’t do it in the current environment.

5/9/20: Dr. Trautman resigns for health reasons related to Covid-19 concerns.

So, was the reason for Trautman's resignation worry about getting the virus? Maybe that played into it. But maybe it’s just thinking, at age 70, there might be better ways of using your remaining healthy days (at least those not spent in prison) than doing all you can to manipulate elections for a particular party while you’re being paid to provide free and fair elections.

Alan Vera explained what happens from here. The Commissioners Court will appoint a replacement—which means it will be a Democrat. The office will be on the ballot in November to fill the remainder of the 4-year term. Then it will be on the ballot again in 2022, when the term ends. That means we could get someone with experience and a will to provide free and fair elections by January 2021. I don’t know how this election will be done, since our primaries are already over. Is it done with all comers and then a runoff? Not sure. But I’m so glad we don’t have to spend yet another 2 ½ years trying to block this woman’s attempts to make voter fraud easier for people like herself.

Here's to hoping all the guilty parties get justice.

Thanks go to Colleen Vera for the digging. Our freedoms depend on people like her who take good citizenship to another level.

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[i] You can read about that here.  The actual letter is found here. 

Another Education and Homeschooling Post

This will be a part II of an education post. In the last post, I offered the first part of my presentation, on  homeschooling, but making the point that, when you look at the entire 6000 years of the history of education, homeschooling is what has been traditional—because it works. And the public school experiment, using a factory model, has only been underway for about a century. And it’s a failing experiment.

On Saturday we had a presentation on the structure of education first. The presenter, Colleen Vera, a retired teacher, has spent years as a watchdog on school issues. One of her specialties is the HarrisCounty Department of Education (which we agree should not exist), and we count on her to attend their meetings, let us know what’s going on, and let us know when we need to take action.

She provided us with this flow chart of the parts of government that make decisions over education. Down at the bottom, with the least influence, are teachers in the classroom and their students.

The summary flowchart of Texas government in education,
from Colleen Vera's presentation
at Cypress Texas Tea Party, November 23, 2019

One fascinating example was her seating chart. Teachers have requirements for seating children based on various rules placed on them. Well under half of the seats are for regular kids. GT (gifted and talented) are used to help the teacher, not the GT student. They’re seated next to the struggling to help them out. Which means the gifted students are placed with the slowest, holding them back, rather than challenging them to move ahead at a rate suited for them.

assigned seating chart based on government requirements
from Colleen Vera's presentation 
at Cypress Texas Tea Party, November 23, 2019 

Note that in middle and high schools, this seating chart is set up for one period; the teacher has to sort through the students like this for every hour of the day. Why? To avoid lawsuits. Not to get better educational outcomes.

As Colleen went through the history of educational initiatives that—as she pointed out before I had a chance—the federal government was not empowered to do by the Constitution, I’m reminded that the federal Department of Education was non-existent until 1979. I went through my entire public school experience without any federal oversight. Somehow we muddled through better than we’ve done since its inception.

SAT scores under Department of Education, begun 1979
from Colleen Vera's presentation
at Cypress Texas Tea Party, November 23, 2019

Colleen offered this chart, showing average SAT scores over the years. The * in 1996 indicates the year they changed the way they scored—in other words, in order to cover the data that showed results were going steadily downward, they cheated. So you can’t measure apples to apples.

Still, there’s a downturn from the beginning of the Department of Education until 1996. And, depending on your state, nothing better than mixed improvement or standing still since 1996.

Why did they institute a federal Department of Education in the first place? Because there was a crisis in education. At first that excuse was for “national defense and social responsibility.” That’s kind of a stretch—past the point of elasticity—of the actual Constitution. But now it’s worse. The new excuse is, “to fix society’s ills.”

She ended her presentation with some suggestions of actions we citizens can take—along with the warning that you can’t single-handedly do it all, so you might want to figure out where your interests lie and focus there. So, here are the actions:

·         Volunteer in public schools (VIPs)

·         Join PTA/PTO

·         Volunteer for Texas Book Review

·         Apply to be on local committees (school growth, bonds, etc.)

·         Apply to local councils (ex: School Health Advisory Council)

·         Start local conservative education PAC

·         Educate yourself on ONE specific area of concern:

o   Research

o   Advocate local school board

o   Advocate State Board of Education

o   Advocate Texas Legislature

o   Advocate Congress

·         Become a Watch Dog

As citizens, we’re in a difficult place. We know the public schools are failing in their mission. We know the federal government has no business involved in education at all. But we’re up against a monopoly. You can’t get out of paying your tax dollars for public schools—even if they do not serve your children, and in fact you have to pay elsewhere for their actual education.

It’s like Canadian health care. You get what you get under the national system. Or you make financial sacrifices to come to America for care. 

We can go to private schools and homeschools—if we’re desperate enough and have the resources over and above what we pay toward schools with our taxes. Education is, by the way, 35% of the Texas budget for 2020.

So the question comes up—and isn’t often answered the way I would prefer—do we leave it alone and let the schools fail, or do we work tirelessly to change any little bit we can affect?

Maybe the answer is, first of all, meet our own children’s needs; then work to have education money spent more wisely. And, if there’s energy left, create a revolution toward free market + philanthrophy solutions.

That isn’t as outlandish as you might think. There’s a portion of my presentation where I compared costs. I toted up what I estimated that we spent. I’m sure I missed some things, but I got most of it. This was our cost breakdown for 3 students for 10 years (only our youngest was homeschooled for the full 10 years):

• Elementary Math: $350

• Secondary Math through Algebra 2 $450

• History and general: about $300

• Lonestar tuition: maybe $1000?

• Kaplan ACT prep (used for progress evaluation): $35

• Museum memberships: $80/year, 7 years = $600

• THSC and homeschool group memberships: $600?

• Driving to homeschool events/activities: unknown

• Books: Who knows? We’d have bought them anyway.

• Loss of income: unknown and unimportant

• Estimated total for 10 years, entire family: $3,335

• Average per year: $333.50

Compare that to the average cost for the State of Texas to educate a child. Stats weren’t all consistent. According to the NEA, Texas spent $10,456 per student for the 2017-18 school year—about $2,300 below the national average. The Census Bureau puts the cost at $8,861 per student per year—still $2,531 under the national average. 

The contrast is significant. My results are anecdotal, but it worked out for us. A sacrifice we were willing to make.

It’s actually getting cheaper.

For example, the $350 elementary math we used, CSMP. Our boys had used it in the gifted magnet school they attended before we moved to Texas, so when I started homeschooling, I called up those teachers and got the information to get it. I got a teacher’s edition, which you only need one of per classroom. There’s also a set of consumable booklets for each student, of which I just got one. We’d been told that program was only used for gifted students, because it was so expensive. But you buy the teacher’s book one time per decade or so (math doesn’t really change). So you’re only buying the consumables. And maybe there’s a better way. But it didn't seem to me that costly per student.

Anyway, that whole thing, 3rd grade through 5th grade, cost me $350 in 2000. It’s now free online. The distributor decided not to continue printing and selling the program, so some enterprising parent asked permission to post everything online and combined with Buffalo State to preserve it. It’s all there now, for free—all years, not just those I had needed.

I compiled a list some years ago on free and very low cost online learning, which I’ve added to a bit here. I’m sure there are many opportunities I’m missing. You could easily accomplish a high school and possibly college education online, where the only thing you’re not getting is the social experience and the debt—oh, and the diploma. So, if we let go of the diploma and other locked doors into the middle and upper class, we’d have much cheaper—and often better by every measure—advanced education. Here’s the list:

•       Hillsdale College Online Courses 

•       PragerU videos 

•       MIT (MIT OpenCourseware)

•       Harvard (Harvard@home)

•       Berkeley (webcastBerkeley)

•       AbeBooks.com 

•       Alibris.com

•       OpenCulture.com 

•       ITunes U 

•       Lynda.com

•       Udemy.com

•       AcademicEarth.org 

•       YouTube EDU

•       VideoLectures.Net 

•       TedTalks 

•       WebMD 

•       BBC video language 

•       GreatCourses.com (about $100 per college level course)

One thing the free market does really well is bring more and better products and services at lower prices. In technology there’s a formula, called Moore’s Law, relevant mainly to transistor size and power, for how technology keeps getting better and cheaper. There’s something like that going on with information. It’s getting more widely available at less cost.

In short, when we’re dealing with the public school system, we need to stand firm on the knowledge that the system is not indispensable. There are alternatives. And when we truly want good educational outcomes for our children, we’ll do what it takes to use those alternatives. 

The more we go to the alternatives, the more the market will follow with even better—and less expensive—solutions.

We'll be doing another Tea Party meeting on education next month, hearing from a couple of conservative members of the State Board of Education. I expect we'll learn even more.

Common Core for Babies

When I write about local issues, it is with the hope that it will help not only local friends, but people wherever they’re reading. So today’s post is about a proposition that is likely to be on the Harris County ballot this off-year November election. But it is also about how the enemy is going about separating parents from the teaching of their children.

This is Texas, where Governor Perry refused federal money for implementing Common Core, the curriculum (no—not a “curriculum,” but simply basic standards, they claim—that just happen to dictate what will be taught in each classroom, on each specific day, in a specified manner; why would you call that curriculum?) that happened to promote a worldview that is in conflict with capitalism, US Constitutional freedom, God-given natural rights, freedom of religion, and probably anything else in conflict with the worldview of most parents.

This is Texas, where the state legislature, led by my State Senator Dan Patrick and others, succeeded in getting rid of CSCOPE, which was a Texas-created (supposedly) version of Common Core, that again wasn’t really “curriculum,” because it was all online, but it also promoted the Common Core worldview indoctrination.

The enemy, however, is relentless.  Now we’re looking at what you could probably call Common Core for Babies. A renamed ACORN group, Collaborative for Children (with ties to George Soros and a long line of Obama minions), has created a corporation in Harris County for the purpose of placing Common Core materials in daycare centers. This organization is Harris County School Readiness Corporation, with a program called Choice Partners. [My notes were insufficient on the status and connection of all the entities. I reserve the right to edit if I learn more later.]

The way they’re going about it is to get tax money, funneled through the Harris County Department of Education, and then offer it to daycares, aiming first at low-income areas that are most likely to be vulnerable to offers of free stuff. The exchange would go something like this:

Listen, we’ll pay your employees for you. You’ll no longer need to worry about meeting payroll, so you’ll be able to concentrate on taking care of children, which is your real passion. We’ll also help pay for equipment and supplies. Did we mention, we’ll even go into the homes of the children and offer guidance to those families? No, this won’t cost you anything. Really. All we ask is that you use our program, teach the things we provide in the way we require. Think about it. It’s for the Children.

It’s always for the children. Right.

I first learned about this issue in June. Colleen Vera wrote about it in her blog, Texas Trash Talk.  Her piece is full of information and connections. But at that time the “to do” part was simply to call legislators during the special session to see if they could find a way to act on it. So I saved the information but didn’t pass it along.

Two months later the threat grows. Here’s the update. Harris County Department of Education (HCDE) has up to now discussed the many known flaws of the program but nevertheless voted 6-1 in favor—so far only to gather more information and decide later.

Meanwhile Collaborative for Children (the ACORN remake) has been gathering signatures to request placing a proposition on the ballot to fund the program. The wording will be called something like a “penny tax.” The phrase “equalization tax” might also appear, because that is what the funding of HCDE is called. Currently this equalization tax is a 2/3 penny tax per $100 of property value, which translates to about $14 million a year. [HCDE educates no one; the independent school districts do that. There are only two counties in the state still with school boards, and money that goes to them is money that could otherwise go directly to the school districts. Dallas County at least uses their county department of education money for transportation, which seems reasonable. But Harris County uses it for various interfering, moneymaking programs. It should not exist. Rep. Debbie Riddle put forth a bill to eliminate the two CDEs during the last legislative session, but it didn’t get out of committee. We’ll have to deal with the corruption of HCDE another day.] An additional penny more than doubles the current amount. Some estimates project that this “insignificant” additional penny tax will take something like $45 million out of the economy [Houston Chronicle says $25 million, so I may have heard wrong while taking notes], pretty much for the sole purpose of indoctrinating our very young children in ways we have boldly rejected—twice.

Kay Smith, HCDE trustee
at Cypress Tea Party meeting

Kay Smith, the lone HCDE vote against, spoke at our local Tea Party meeting this past Saturday, which is how this issue got my attention again. (She also provided info to Colleen Vera for her article in June.) She needs help if there’s any hope of stopping this Common Core infiltration. The next HCDE vote will take place next Tuesday, August 20, 1:00 PM (address is 6300 Irvington Blvd., Houston, TX, 77022—it’s in the Reagan Building, where HCDE is housed, with the meeting taking place in their board room on the fourth floor, in case you are local and available to attend).

August 20^th, the day of the vote to place the proposition on the county ballot, is also the deadline for collecting signatures for the petition. True the Vote has offered help in verifying signatures, as they did for Wisconsin’s recall back in 2012. But it’s not possible to verify on the very day the signatures are turned in, before the vote in the 1:00 meeting. I don’t know whether attending the meeting to speak against the proposition will help, but it can’t hurt.

County Judge Ed Emmett was apprised of the problem (all counties in Texas are led by an elected judge, so Judge Emmett is actually an elected official over a constituency that is maybe only smaller than New York City and Los Angeles). Just one of the legal questions is about putting a proposition on the ballot to direct school money to a private entity. He went to Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott to rule on whether the proposition can be placed on the ballot. AG Abbott would not rule; he said it would need to be ruled on by the county attorney. I think he’s legally correct on that. Unfortunately, the Harris County Attorney is Vince Ryan, a Democrat; he has already said he would allow placement on the ballot with a rather flippant, “Let them sue us later.”

I asked Kay Smith whether anyone was considering such a lawsuit, as a backup, in case we can’t persuade the HCDE board to vote against. She said it would be a very expensive ordeal. The opposition has big money behind it, leading back even to George Soros money. So it would be nice if there were some willing patriot out there willing to take it on, but she doesn’t know of anyone.

When I talked this over with my son Political Sphere, who is beginning to think like a lawyer, he said the lawsuit would be expensive to take all the way to the end. But what you really need is just a suit to be filed, so that you can ask for an injunction to prevent the proposition from appearing on the ballot until the questions of legality are answered. Even if it were to delay only a few months, that would avoid this year’s low-voter-turnout off-year election, and would give more time to get the word out. Getting the word out on CSCOPE brought its removal pretty quickly. And since lawsuits tend to go on for at least a year, maybe two, we might even avoid another election cycle. And maybe with the serious legal questions being brought to light, HCDE would then vote to change their minds and remove it from the ballot.

Still, as Kay Smith said, it would take a willing patriot out there, with at least some money resources, to take it on.

Why should we be so concerned about an issue that only affects some low-income daycares? Because that is not the end; that is only the foot in the door. The plan is to expand the daycare program statewide. And of course that’s not all. If they’ve been consistently teaching children up to age 4, why not add in pre-K kids? And if you include pre-K kids, why not kindergarteners? And after that, since kids are now used to this “standard” up to age 6 or so, why not extend that through elementary schools? And once you’ve had kids accustomed to the same thing for all their school lives, why not expand to middle schools and then high schools?

Oh, and by the way, since “standardization” is “for the children,” it wouldn’t be “fair” for any children to be left out. So they would push to have all Texas students meet the “standards,” even though that might mean forcing homeschools and private schools to use it. And if compliance is too difficult, then maybe we’d just need to eliminate homeschools, and maybe private schools too. For the children!

Does this seem farfetched? Remember that this administration’s DOJ went out of its way to overturn asylum for the Romeike family, from Germany, for no better reason than they wanted it on record that they supported Germany’s policy of preventing homeschooling and standardizing all the education in the country—because this administration believes parents do not have a natural right to make decisions about the education and upbringing of their children.

They want control. And, as Lenin said, “Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” Of course they want control over the ideas being taught to children, to perpetuate their control over additional generations. Tyrannists always want that.

What can we do?

·         Attend Tuesday’s HCDE meeting and make your opinion known.

·         If it gets on the ballot (a 99% probability, according to Kay Smith), then get the word out to everyone you know, so they know this tiny off-year election is extremely important.

·         If you have connections to resources, file a lawsuit regarding the illegalities of placing this particular proposition on the ballot.

·         If it ends up on the ballot, vote against it, and take your friends to vote with you.

·         If you’re in another place, expect this to be coming to you, and do all you can to fight it. The names change from place to place, so be aware and vigilant. Even if your locale has rejected Common Core in any form, this daycare version is a new backdoor approach to watch for.