More on CSCOPE

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about curriculum, with some info about CSCOPE, the Texas version of Common Core. I went to a presentation about it Monday evening and learned a few more things. The full presentation is available at King Street Live, with speakers radio commentator Ben Streusand and Peggy Venable of Americans for Prosperity-Texas. Some details I picked up by monopolizing Mr. Streusand’s time afterward with my questions; if I have things wrong, however, please assume I got it wrong while gathering info during conversation without taking notes.

Ben Streusand, Peggy Venable, and Catherine Engelbrecht

I learned that it has been used for nearly a decade in some districts, mostly rural. In fact, it’s more a problem in rural areas than in cities—although my large suburban district has been using it, at least for some subjects. (Fun fact: CSCOPE isn’t an acronym for anything; it just seemed like an appealing name.)

There are Education Service Centers, (ESCs) across the state, where districts can combine, maybe county-wide or bigger, to share information, curriculum, and other resources. In cities, there are so many districts within a county that this simply isn’t an issue. Of those districts using ESCs, 80% use CSCOPE; they pay a hefty chunk of taxpayer education dollars for access to the materials.

To review, CSCOPE is supposedly a collection of lesson plans, 1600 or so, submitted by teachers, former teachers, and curriculum writers across the state. Submitters had to sign away their rights to review their materials and how they were used. No organization previewed the entire set of materials before implementing them, possibly not even the board of CSCOPE. And there are rumors that many of the materials were written by the same curriculum writers as the federal Common Core.

Teachers and others who use CSCOPE are required to sign an oath not to share the materials with the parents of students or anyone else. Supposedly this was for copyright protection of materials that are only digital. But it appears more secretive than that purpose deserves. Curriculum is subject to review by the State Board of Education, but CSCOPE sidestepped that requirement by claiming it is just “lesson plans,” not curriculum.

I looked up an official definition of “lesson plan”:

A detailed description of the individual lessons that a teacher plans to teach on a given day. A lesson plan is developed by a teacher to guide instruction throughout the day. It is a method of planning and preparation. A lesson plan traditionally includes the name of the lesson, the date of the lesson, the objective the lesson focuses on, the materials that will be used, and a summary of all the activities that will be used. Lesson plans are a terrific set of guidelines for substitute teachers.

What’s the difference between that and curriculum? Nothing. A lesson plan is just a small unit of curriculum. It’s like saying, “That’s not bread; it’s a slice.” Pretending it’s something else by using a different word is kind of a creepy way to get around having oversight, especially when you look at it in tandem with the no disclosure policy. Under those circumstances, we’d be remiss not to be suspicious.

Dan Patrick, my state senator and the head of the Senate Education Committee, introduced a bill to create oversight. As of today, the bill looks like it’s making progress. A public hearing was held Tuesday, and SB 1406 was approved in the Education Committee Thursday (voted 7-0 in favor). Next it moves on to the full Senate for a vote. Then it moves on to the House. It looks like it has a good chance. (There’s a similar bill in the House, HB 760, referred to the Education Committee, but not making as much progress yet.)

The legislation is the result of an agreement with the CSCOPE board, to implement oversight. Dan Patrick’s press release on February 8 describes what the legislation is designed to do.  In short, the agreement includes:

·         the State Board of Education (SBOE) to review all the materials;

·         CSCOPE board meetings must be public meetings;

·         teachers who submitted lesson plans will be allowed to review and reveal the plans;

·         parents will be allowed to review the lesson plans online.

Of course eliminating the curriculum entirely would be better than just overseeing it. Senator Patrick would have preferred legislation to eliminate CSCOPE altogether. Unfortunately, he couldn’t get enough votes to make that happen. It’s not really a problem of persuading Democrats to join in; Dems tend to represent larger inner city districts that don’t use ESCs, and therefore aren’t very interested in CSCOPE in the first place. It’s the GOP representatives of rural districts that are the challenge.

If you’re looking for someone to influence, a polite call or email to the following, suggesting they take into account your disapproval of CSCOPE, could be helpful. It’s too late to put forth legislation this session to eliminate CSCOPE (with the unlikely exception that SB 1406 could be amended to the point that it essentially gets substituted with elimination, but I don’t foresee that). But approval of SB 1406 at least improves the situation and gives us a first step.

·         Senator Robert Nichols, District 3

·         Senator Kevin Eltife, District 1

·         Senator Craig Estes, District 30

·         Senator Kel Seliger, District 31

·         Senator Robert Duncan, District 28 

Here’s one more opportunity for you Texans. This bill creates a method of review of the extremely large mass of lesson plans. The SBOE members aren’t going to be doing that alone. You could become one of the reviewers. Contact your representative on the State Board of Education and offer your services. The review is starting with social studies first, and then will move on to science. I don’t yet know all that being a reviewer entails. Pretty certain this would be volunteer work. But it could be extremely valuable.

It’s possible that, as we speak, the CSCOPE powers-that-be are scrubbing the materials of the most blatantly objectionable content. But if problems are found, those portions can be eliminated. Presumably if massive portions are objectionable and overall value is seen as negative, maybe the SBOE can disapprove of CSCOPE as a whole.

You can also find out if CSCOPE is used in your district and go directly to your local school board to insist on it being eliminated. No need to wait for the next legislative session, if we assert the power of parents, where the power belongs.

Americans for Prosperity-Texas provides basic information as well as links to more details. Also review Glenn Beck's March 7 story.

A Few Collected Words

I continue to keep an ever-growing quote file, things that spark a connection, helping to clarify the principles that lead to freedom, prosperity, and civilization. Maybe, after the heavy writing of the last couple of weeks, it’s a good day to share a few words from other minds.

These first few were quoted in a speech by Judge Thomas B. Griffith, US Circuit Court of Appeals. The speech was called , “The Hard Work of Understanding the Constitution,” given at BYU September 18, 2012. 

Patriotism is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime.—Adlai Stevenson 

The first requisite of a good citizen in this republic of ours is that he shall be able and willing to pull his own weight.—Teddy Roosevelt 

The work of citizenship is hard work that calls upon us to use our best thinking,

our most careful study, our most rigorous analysis.—Aristotle

 

Following the law places a judge in a role that is in large part clerical, where he labors largely as a functionary, applying and implementing the law. The judge’s primary task is to find and follow the law.—BYU Law Professor Brett Sharp

 

Nothing you learn here at Oxford will be of the slightest possible use to you later, save only this: if you work hard and intelligently, you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot. And that is the main, if not the sole, purpose of education.—Harold MacMillan, Prime Minister of Great Britain, Chancellor of Oxford from 1960-1986, to an Oxford graduating class 

 

This final, longer quote is from Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the beginning of “Men Have Forgotten God,” the Templeton Address, 1983:

More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.

Since then I have spent well-nigh fifty years working on the history of our Revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.

What is more, the events of the Russian Revolution can only be understood now, at the end of the century, against the background of what has since occurred in the rest of the world. What emerges here is a process of universal significance. And if I were called upon to identify briefly the principal trait of the entire twentieth century, here too, I would be unable to find anything more precise and pithy than to repeat once again: Men have forgotten God.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

SCOTUS on Marriage Part III: Outcomes of the Cases

Part I is on Definitions, Part II is on Arguments. Today's Part III is on Possible Outcomes

I have a poor record for predicting what the courts will do; I like to think positively, and believe all will work out. But after last year’s tortured ruling on Obamacare, all bets are off. I can’t predict. The oral arguments are almost certainly after the fact of the justices making their individual decision. They have already begun drafting their opinions. So all I can do is summarize the issues.

The two cases both deal with the definition of marriage, but ask different specific questions of law. The Prop 8 case is about whether the people of a state have a right to decide to keep the definition of marriage it has always had, or will have a redefinition forced on them by judges. The decision might avoid an actual decision by deciding the defenders of Prop 8 have no standing, which is a catch 22 situation. The people used the initiative process to override state-imposed changes against their will. Then the state refused to defend the people’s vote against the judges who overruled the people. To say no one but the state has standing leaves us asking, who can be the advocate of the people against the state?

Photo credit: npr.org

If the case is thrown out, it will only affect the state of California, with all the real issues still up in the air. But it also means the people have no recourse against a tyrannical state. Still, I think it’s unlikely the Supreme Court will use this case to announce a new unwritten “right” to same-sex “marriage.”

The DOMA case is about whether defending the long-standing definition of marriage is constitutional. The main question here is, when/how did the millennia-old definition of marriage become unconstitutional? A “right,” by definition, means God granted it, and it is just a matter of the state being prevented from infringing on that right.

If the court decides there is a right to marry (to be granted all legal and society honors) based on having a sexual relationship of one’s choice, why would it be constitutional to refuse to grant those same marriage honors to people who want to marry more than one at a time, or someone who is a close relative, or someone not alive, or someone nonhuman, or someone not of age? That is the slippery slope argument. The only defense to it is, “There is no slippery slope. We’re not talking about that; we’re only talking about the rights of same-sex couples.” And if you refuse to look at the argument, you submit yourself to being surprised by the slippery slope, which logically follows.

The argument against DOMA in the 90s was that it wasn’t necessary, because no one was even considering threatening the definition of marriage. Today’s arguments are equally disingenuous. Taking fidelity, permanence, and family establishment out of the definition of marriage, and pretending it has always been just a love thing, just honoring two people who have chosen to have an emotional connection for the time being, does not benefit society, and it certainly doesn’t leave marriage and family unharmed.

The DOMA decision hinges on rationality. Is there a rational reason to define marriage as it has always been defined if that prevents some people from enjoying the benefits of marriage? The threshold is actually quite low; if a single rational person can be found to have a single logical reason, then it is not irrational to uphold the law. The other side has to prove that there is no rationale for preventing marriage benefits from being extended to people who don’t currently meet the requirements for marriage.

It should be an easy decision, because family, fidelity, and permanence are all outcomes of the marriage contract that have an extraordinarily long history of benefit. In order to rule against DOMA, a very few states get deemed “rational” while the majority of people in the vast majority of states are deemed unreasonable—and bigoted hatemongers to boot.

But in political bodies (and the Supreme Court is unfortunately political, against design), simple facts get obscured behind other motivations. The opposition to the defense of marriage have enlisted a willing media in framing the argument as a civil right to marry—leaving out a great many details: homosexuals are free to (and frequently do) marry a person of the opposite sex like everyone else; there is no guarantee to anyone of marrying the “person of their choice” if the person they choose is already married or is a close relative, or is someone who doesn’t consent to marry them, or is someone below the age of consent or is mentally incapable of giving consent, and various other limitations.

I don’t think the cases available provide the possibility that the Supreme Court can come out with a declaration that marriage must be defined as it always has been not only by the federal government but also in all the states. I think upholding DOMA would only affect definitions within federal law, which leaves things the way they are now, with the possibility that individual states can define marriage differently in contracts within their states.

This is still problematic, because of the “full faith and credit clause.” Generally, contracts made in one state are upheld within the other US states. If you get married in Idaho, you don’t have to get remarried if you visit or move to Virginia. But, in the case of marriage, if a state grants all the rights and title of marriage to a same-sex couple, and that couple moves to a state that doesn’t recognize that change in the definition of marriage, would that second state be forced to recognize the contract? Thirty-one states have foreseen this scenario and have protected themselves, beyond statute, by declaring the long-standing definition of marriage in their state constitutions. Which makes it a question of sovereignty, so that a single state doesn’t hold power without representation over the people of all the other states.

Can same-sex couples move to these states and sue for recognition of their contract? Yes, and that does seem to be a strategy. Because of the deeply held beliefs—the strong rationale for marriage—it would seem reasonable for such couples to either stay where they have a recognized contract or assume that their contract is not binding. But instead of accepting that limitation for themselves, they press for all of society to change. So far, however, no case has made it through the lower courts to the point where a test case could reach the Supreme Court.

My hope for the Supreme Court is that they are swayed by the awareness that Roe v. Wade was not only bad law, it interfered with the state-by-state working out of a divisive issue. The court, I believe, will try to prevent such intrusion for now. I think they are likely to seek some middle-of-the-road still indecisive decision.

On Prop 8 I hope they will find in favor of the people’s law, but whichever way it goes, they are likely to clarify that the decision is only pertaining to the people of California and their initiative process.

On DOMA, I think they should uphold, because to do otherwise would be very disruptive to contract law and would be the most intrusive decision. Even if I’m wrong, I think they will try to find a way to prevent the decision from being a declaration of a new “civil right” for anyone to marry anyone of their choice.

As with Obamacare, we’re trying to predict the minds of Kennedy and Roberts. Kennedy tends to look consistently at civil rights fairness, so it’s hard to know whether he will succumb to the drumbeat argument of the opposition or consider the full meaning of the marriage contract. He is an unknown.

Rumor over the weekend was that Justice Roberts has a lesbian cousin who was sitting in his section during the hearing. I assume that report is intended to cause us to believe that merely having a cousin with an assumed opinion is enough to change the chief justice’s opinion on what the Constitution says. I hope that isn’t so, but I offer no guarantees. Roberts went way out of his way on Obamacare not to strike down the law. It seemed so out of character that people have speculated conspiracy theories, that the administration holds some piece of evidence (even if it’s something untrue and manufactured) over him as a threat, so he must not cross them. Maybe so, but it could be that he just personally seeks to avoid acting in a declarative way.

At any rate, it is unfortunate that the future of civilization is on a knife edge, at the mercy of nine unelected political appointees, two-thirds of whom are more likely to work toward their desired outcome rather than declare what the Constitution says. (May Thomas, Alito, and Scalia live long and healthy lives!)

On an ironic side note, on Sunday, March 24, about 300,000 protestors marched on the capital of France, in defiance of a bill sponsored by their president that would allow same-sex “marriage,” which has already passed the lower parliament. Even the people of France, where sex outside of marriage has been considered a cultural norm for centuries, are standing up against the imposition of the homosexual agenda.

SCOTUS on Marriage, Part II: The Gotcha Question

The SCOTUS heard oral arguments concerning the definition of marriage Tuesday and Wednesday of this week: Tuesday on California’s Prop 8 and Wednesday on the federal DOMA law. This is part II of my commentary on the discussion. On Wednesday, in Part I, I wrote on a couple of basic definitions. Today I’m looking at the Gotcha question, plus the “Voice of the Children” argument. It’s going to take a third post, coming Monday, to deal with the possible outcomes of the court cases.

The Gotcha Question

Here’s the Gotcha question: “How does a same-sex ‘marriage’ harm your heterosexual marriage?” The assumption is that there is no harm, so there is no answer. But there is harm, even if it isn’t blatantly obvious to the casual onlooker.

The current definition of marriage is a particular contract, binding the parties of the contract with the promise of fidelity, permanence, and protection of family. To change the definition removes those promises from even existing contracts.

Procreation: Separating the marriage contract from the act leading to procreation means nullifying and changing the contract so that there is no particular interest in family. This is important because, without interest in family, there’s pretty much no societal benefit from the contract that the state has an interest in. All benefits of marriage go to couples without the couples giving anything of value to society.

Fidelity: The change in contract also removes the promise of fidelity, because unfaithfulness in a same-sex relationship has no effect on the vulnerability of offspring and parents, in competition with a possible usurper of those protections. (Same-sex partners, incidentally, tend to be unfaithful at rates nearing 100%.) I had the promise of fidelity from my mate when I made the contract; if the court changes the definitions within the contract, it takes away from me this contractual promise.

Permanence: The establishment of permanent family in the original contract is also made vulnerable; since there is no dependent spouse or child produced by procreation within the marriage, there is no assumption of harm when a relationship ends. That is why government has had no interest in automatically sorting out division of property when same-sex couples part (which they do, historically, at rates approaching 100%). Similarly, government stays out when co-habiting unmarried heterosexual couples split.

So the change in definition means the new contract has no promise of fidelity, permanence, or family. How does that play out?

Suppose a father of several children, married to a woman for more than a decade, decides he prefers a different woman, and he ends the contract. The wife, who sacrificed considerably—health, career, energy, time, personal wealth—to procreation and raising the children, is left unprotected. She has no promise of alimony to make up for her sacrifice; she has no promise of custody if she doesn’t have as many resources as the father. She is told all can be taken from her, because there was no expectation of fidelity, permanence, or family in the original contract (even though she entered the contract with those promises expected).

Does the change in definition mean this woman’s relationship with her spouse will end in this disaster? No. But is the loss of protection from this threat real? Yes. She has been harmed.

Suppose a woman is married to a man for more than a decade, producing several children, but she has been unfaithful multiple times. She may be uncertain of the fatherhood of each of the children, or she may know the spouse is not the father. She gets the tax and insurance benefits plus honor of society nevertheless, simply because she continues having a sexual relationship with the spouse, but because there is no expectation of fidelity, the man has no right to expect that any children born to the woman were his offspring. Why marry in the first place, if he doesn’t even have that promise? And if he has no expectation of father-child relationship to the woman’s offspring, can there be an expectation that he provide for them? The man has been harmed by the change in contract, and so have the children.

No longer is it a contract requiring fidelity, permanence, and protections to family. It is now a contract implying only an announcement that two people choose to have some sort of sexual relationship, not necessarily exclusive, not necessarily permanent, and no interest in producing or protecting children—but the contract nevertheless requires society and government to give advantages and honors to the couple simply for their declaration of “love.”

Same-sex “marriage” makes it a different contract than it was. Courts will treat it as a different contract in all 1100+ laws relating to the contract. Laws surrounding marriage—property division, child custody, alimony, etc. will change, because the purpose of marriage and the state’s interest in it will have changed. Parents even lose the values attached to being a mother or father; those get substituted with neutral meaningless terms like “parent 1” or “caregiver.” Those who already have the original contract lose its meaning, and couples marrying in the future have no way to make the contract that heretofore has been available.

Voice of the Children Argument

One of the relatively new arguments voiced last Tuesday will probably be referred to as the “Voice of the Children” argument. The estimated thousands of children living with same-sex parents want their parents to have the same respect that married heterosexual parents have. This is interesting. Adults put children in the position of a family without a married mother and father, and then accuse, “How can you be so unfair to our children?” Instead of solving the problem by avoiding putting children in this deficient situation, they tell society it must accept the problem situation as equivalent to ideal as if that would solve the problem. Or, in other words, let’s decide to pretend it isn’t a problem, so that no one has to suffer the problem.

The question ought to be, what are children entitled to? They are entitled to being raised in a family with married mother and father; society should do all within its power to encourage that situation for each child. Wherever that isn’t possible, the situation for the child will be statistically likely to be deficient, and society will have to somehow use its social and economic capital to make up the deficiency as well as it can.

If society were actually interested in what is best for the child, then the child would be placed within a traditional family for adoption. But that is not being considered by anyone as an option, particularly for children born biologically to one of the same-sex parents. We as a society allow a great deal of freedom among individuals to make mistakes and choose their own way of dealing with them. While in past generations most children born to unwed mothers were voluntarily put up for adoption, today many more unwed mothers (above 90%) keep the child, thus depriving the child of a parent (also making adoption much more difficult for couples wishing to adopt, but that’s a discussion for another day). Many similar problems arise from divorce as well. We don’t take children away from divorcing parents to put them in other two-parent homes; the idea is abhorrent, even to the strongest defenders of the natural family.

With that option off the table, then society must simply spend its social capital tolerating the fact that some children will be raised without a mother and a father.

No matter how much the children are saying, “We don’t want our family to be seen as less ideal than families with a mother and father,” society can’t change facts. We sympathize for any child missing a father or mother, but we can’t magically say, “We’ll just say your situation doesn’t miss a father or mother, and then you won’t feel like you’re missing out.” When children demand, “I want! I want! I want!” sometimes the grown-up has to say, “I’m sorry, but that’s not something you can have.”

Supreme Court and the Definition of Marriage

I’ve written pretty thoroughly on the subject of protecting marriage. Here’s the basic list again:

• In Defense of Marriage
• Defining Marriage and Making Cream Sauce (I co-authored with Richard Wilkins)
• The Gay Marriage Fantasy
• Why Texas Will Vote to Protect Marriage—NoMatter What You Call Us
•        Devaluing Marriage and Family--Part I, Part II, Part III
   

So today, I’m just commenting on some of what we’re seeing in the Supreme Court’s hearing of oral arguments, Tuesday on the Prop 8 California case, and Wednesday on the federal DOMA law.

Some of the difficulty is the media wording of the issues, so I think I’ll do a little translation.

Banning is the wrong word. To ban something, the something must exist first. No one is “banning” same-sex “marriage”; they are defending the definition marriage has always had—since before the state existed to codify it in law. Technically, California claims same-sex “marriage” existed there and was then “banned,” but that’s disingenuous. The people of the state of California voted to keep the definition, and the legislature decided to ignore them, so, before the legislation went into effect, the people of the state put forth a proposition to change the constitution to retain the original definition of marriage and won by majority vote. And then judges flouted the decision, granting marriage licenses to people who didn’t qualify for said licenses, leading to the court cases at issue now.  So, every time you hear the word ban, know that it is the result of media manipulating public opinion.

“Same-sex marriage” is an oxymoron. Marriage, real marriage, concerns the legal and societal concern with what happens because of a specific sexual act, and only that act. To be blunt, a marriage is only consummated once the couple engages in the male sexual organ penetrating the female sexual organ, making possible egg fertilization. If a married couple engages in any other type of mutually voluntary sexual behavior, the state is simply uninterested. The reason is that this particular sex act is what leads to procreation, which is of vital interest to society, including the vulnerability caused by procreation, especially to children but also to mothers.

Oral arguments Tuesday touched on the procreation issue, but only awkwardly. What about couples who are infertile? What about couples marrying too late in life to procreate? (Justice Kagan asked about marriage after age 55, for example, apparently unaware that history offers many examples of people 55 or older becoming parents.) Those questions are not for the court to be concerned with; those are medical questions. Those couples can still marry, because they can still engage in the sex act. And they can establish permanent families going forward. Couples that fail to consummate the marriage can have the contract annulled, meaning that because they do not include the behavior of concern, their relationship does not qualify as marriage.

I don’t know why the simple question isn’t posed to same-sex couples: “Do you intend to engage in male/female sexual intercourse required for marriage? And how do you intend to do that without the appropriate body parts?” Their issue isn’t infertility. Mostly they are fertile. They are simply not engaging in the act with an appropriate partner to qualify for marriage.

There is not now, and has not been, any law “banning” homosexuals from marrying—when marrying means engaging in the singular male/female sex act that can lead to procreation, God willing. Homosexuals raising children have all either engaged in that act, or they have adopted a child produced through the coming together of someone else’s male and female seed. Even in the growing business of female homosexuals using in vitro fertilization, they can’t combine their egg with the egg of their partner; they have to have the semen from a male donor. There is no physiological way for this couple to produce offspring together. This basic fact of life ought to be obvious.

The supposed gotcha question of those seeking to redefine marriage is, “How does a same-sex ‘marriage’ harm your heterosexual marriage?” And the assumption is that there is no harm, so there is no answer. But that is incorrect.  There’s enough to say on that to wait for another post.

Oppression through Education

This is the last of a five-part series of posts on educational concerns. (The other four are here, here, here, and here.) All of this was triggered by discussions a couple of weeks ago about a national curriculum being imposed, called Common Core, and a Texas alternative called CSCOPE.

I am not an expert on these specific curricula. But you can look things up as well as I can. Common Core has this mission statement: 

The Common Core State Standards provide a consistent, clear understanding of what students are expected to learn, so teachers and parents know what they need to do to help them. The standards are designed to be robust and relevant to the real world, reflecting the knowledge and skills that our young people need for success in college and careers. With American students fully prepared for the future, our communities will be best positioned to compete successfully in the global economy.

Why common standards?

Building on the excellent foundation of standards states have laid, the Common Core State Standards are the first step in providing our young people with a high-quality education. It should be clear to every student, parent, and teacher what the standards of success are in every school.

Then you can click on the specific standards for math and English language arts. But I have this additional question: We’ve had a US Department of Education, a cabinet level organization, since Jimmy Carter implemented it in 1979—so why has it taken more than three decades to take this “first step in providing our young people with a high-quality education”? What have they been trying to do thus far, if they couldn’t even take a first step until now? Just marching in place? Going backward? Gathering data that suddenly now all makes everything possible?

And if we’ve had this US Department of Education failing to do its stated purpose for thirty-three years so far, why should we trust that now, suddenly, without a positive track record, they’ve got the solution to all of our state, local, and individual student education challenges?

If I understand correctly, the US Department receives taxpayer dollars, which filter through various bureaucratic offices, and get sent back to the states—to be used as the federal government dictates. And right now a chunk of that is attached to strings, particularly the requirement that Common Core be used. They have a map showing that all but a few recalcitrant states have succumbed to the bribe.

Texas is one of the recalcitrant ones. Governor Perry stated clearly that we Texans would not take federal dollars with federal strings attached, which would limit our ability to meet our needs here. Go Perry!

But then we learned that, in its place, Texas had adopted something called CSCOPE. Technically, it’s not “curriculum”; it’s called “instructional material,” so the State Board of Education doesn’t have oversight. It’s just a tool to help teachers plan their teaching to match state testing requirements. Innocent enough, right? Turns out, not so innocent.

I first learned about CSCOPE last fall, at a local Tea Party meeting. We have several people there who regularly attend our local school district board meetings. And right about then there was an uproar about the way CSCOPE presented sex education, particularly to very young ages. And one of the additional difficulties with CSCOPE is that it’s all online, rather than a textbook that can be reviewed. This is supposed to make it more cost effective, because things can be changed online as needed, without reprinting costs. But it adds additional copyright challenges. The entities creating and selling CSCOPE have approached that problem by refusing parental review and forcing teachers to sign non-disclosure statements. Not even the chair of the State Board of Education was allowed to review the materials.

Just to clarify: parents don’t get to see what’s in it, and teachers aren’t allowed to tell parents what’s in it. A couple of teachers who have gone ahead and talked over concerns with parents (after parents hear some worrisome things that their kids are being taught) have been reprimanded, fired, or forced to leave the teaching profession. (Here is one parent's run-in with CSCOPE curriculum.)

Parents in our district, specifically about the sex education, caused such an uproar that, rather than keep defending the curriculum, the district withdrew CSCOPE as the source of sex education. I don’t think that means all CSCOPE has been discarded in the district, however. And it’s used in about 80% of Texas independent school districts.

I don’t have all the data points, but it appears that the “progressive” indoctrination within CSCOPE, and there is plenty of that, is supported by the same supporters as Common Core. Common Core even sought to purchase CSCOPE at one point. Shadowy figures like George Soros are mentioned as among the funding sources way in the background. Maybe true? I don’t know. I guess I’m paranoid enough about tyrannists that I see it as a possibility.

Texans don’t generally sit still while some foolish “experts” try to walk over us. We stand up. Some of that has begun to happen. My state senator, Senator Dan Patrick, introduced legislation, just before the deadline for filing a couple of weeks ago, a bill to provide oversight for CSCOPE. I think scrapping it would be a better option than tweaking it. Nevertheless, there is now going to be an oversight board. Here’s the press release from the CSCOPE website concerning the agreed upon changes.

Glenn Beck spent a day  talking about CSCOPE on his show (March 7; this article has several videos within, all worth watching) identifying some of the problems. There are many problems, and some of the guests on his show also described it as only a mediocre curriculum, as far as usefulness in teaching students.

What we must not do is get into an argument about whether the curriculum is good or bad, or good enough. Quality is not the primary question.

My curriculum was written on my computer, as I got to it each semester, outlining our plans, and keeping our records. It was good enough. A curriculum does not have to be flawless; it only has to be flexible and customized to each student. No matter how good a standardized curriculum is, it will not meet the needs of kids who are either fast, slow, or different-style learners.

Some of the discussions about these factory-style curricula showed math that the Beck guests all agreed was fuzzy and stupid. My son Political Sphere called me after he saw it and said, “That looks like what we did.” Before we homeschooled, back when the boys were in elementary school (a gifted magnet school), we were working on getting math facts faster. So we played around with a book called Mathemagics: How to Look Like a Genius without Really Trying. One of the tricks in it was helping you do multiplication in your head, doing the tens first and then adding the ones. Second son, Economic Sphere, used to do 2x2 multiplication in his head, as a second grader, faster than I could do it either in my head or with a calculator. We used this book again the summer after his freshman year of college, and he was doing three-digit division in his head about that fast. I’ve later learned that similar approaches work for Asians because of the way their languages say numbers. And in the book Cheaper by the Dozen, the Galbraith kids, back about 90 years ago, were taught similar calculation skills that their dad drilled them on and enjoyed showing off.

The point is, there might be specifics within the curriculum that we might disagree on, as to whether they are good ideas, at least for some students. And there might be stated overall goals, like teaching critical thinking skills, that would be hard to disagree with. So the argument must not be about whether this curriculum is good enough, because that allows the assumption that some hypothetical standardized curriculum would be acceptable.

These curricula must be stopped because there is a serious risk that standardized curricula can be used (and have been) for indoctrination and control—whether they are effective education tools or not.

Father of modern education, Horace Mann, let us know the plan in the 1800s: “What the church has been for medieval man, the public school must become for democratic and rational man. God will be replaced by the concept of the public good.”

His acolyte, John Dewey (yes, the one who created the Dewey decimal system) took Mann’s ideas and made them worse. He took great classic books out of schools, and offered up moral relativism, promoting socialist ideology through so-called scientific education expertise. He’s made so much “progress” that we’re barely still able to assert that a standardized curriculum that promotes socialism and denigrates America is a bad use of our tax dollars.

The Parental Right to Educate

We’ve been covering education topics for a few posts now, mostly in preparation for current related news. Last Friday’s post presented the concept of the parental right and responsibility to educate their children. Monday’s post covered definitions of curriculum and textbooks, to take away some of the mystique of the experts. Wednesday’s post covered more skepticism of centralized control, revealing the lack of connection between accreditation and educational outcomes.



The Romeike family in 2010
photo from NY Times story

Today I want to cover a particular case. I mentioned this case back in October 2011. A German family, the Romeikes, an Evangelical Christian family with six children, found that the German public schools did not meet their family’s educational needs. They found that local private schools (which, in Germany, are required to teach the government dictated curriculum used in public schools) were an even worse environment. They came slowly to look into homeschooling, which is illegal in Germany, and has been since long before WWII. A few people do it undercover. (I actually know an American homeschooling family who worked in Germany for a year, that managed to stay under the radar during their stay.) The Romeikes finally saw it as their best option, believing that, if caught, the outcome would be fines they were willing to pay.

It turned out the fines were onerous, and the government threatened to take the children away from the parents, and possibly imprison the parents as well.

They did the legal thing; they went through the legal system in Germany first. Failing there, and with the threat of family dissolution looming, they came to the United States in 2008 and requested asylum. That was granted in 2010, by a judge in Tennessee, who spoke strongly in favor of their parental rights.

There was reason to rejoice, but it didn’t last long. The Department of Homeland Security (the Immigration and Naturalization Service, under DHS) stepped up to insist the judge had ruled incorrectly, and that the family should not be granted asylum.

There are some specific guidelines for qualifying for asylum. Being persecuted for religious reasons is one; so is being part of a specific targeted social group, which it is argued homeschoolers are. The judge in his ruling spelled out why the family qualified, so he was following the law, even though circumstances were unusual.

The case comes up for appeal before the Sixth Circuit Court on April 23^rd. It’s unclear to me how the case is set up. The Romeikes won the original case, so no need for appeal. So the government must have stepped in to insist on appeal, forcing the family to re-defend their position.

If this were simply a question of asylum, there might be some conceivable reason for pressing the question. If we allowed just anyone feeling unhappy in their home country to come here, we would be hard-pressed to accommodate the rush. But this family has been here since 2008. During the two years it took to get the ruling in their favor, they were productive and contributing members of society. During the additional three years, they have continued their noble behavior—and there has not been a sudden increase in similar requests for asylum based on homeschooling prejudices (or even religious prejudices) from Germany or elsewhere.

So the administration has stepped in, pretty much out of the blue, targeting a clearly harmless family for deportation—when the known outcome will be termination of custody of their own children, plus hefty fines and prison terms. Not only will they lose the right to educate their children as they see fit, they will lose the right to have a relationship with their children, and will have their lives essentially ruined and livelihood ended. That may not be a death threat, as with many asylum cases, but it’s pretty severe.

This is an administration that just set free a large number of illegal aliens who had been incarcerated. They have sued the state of Arizona for even asking people taken into custody for other infractions whether they have legal status. “Everyone is welcome, and we hope you’ll be voting for us soon,” is practically the announced immigration policy.

So why go to so much trouble to expel this particular family that came here legally?

I’ve wondered if there was pressure from Germany, which is an ally, and would appear somewhat embarrassed by the accusation of oppression that the request for asylum implies. There may be something behind the scenes, but there’s no mention of a request for extradition or any such thing in the stories I’ve read. And it seems unlikely there would be such a request. Germany’s stated purpose for the anti-homeschooling law is that they want to discourage factions and separateness within the country; having the family leave means problem solved.

Whether there’s some backroom discussion with Germany or not, this prosecution by the federal government clearly exposes this administration’s belief: there is no parental to right to see to the care, control, and upbringing of children, nor is this administration willing to protect any so-called parental rights.

Not all natural rights are spelled out in the first Ten Amendments to the Constitution. The reason even those are amendments is that natural rights were understood and accepted, so much so they didn’t need to be mentioned. It was fear that people might someday become corrupt enough not to understand and accept the natural God-given rights that led to the addition of the Bill of Rights. But it was so far from their thinking that anyone would come to believe someone other than parents owned the responsibility for raising the next generation that they didn’t even think to spell it out. Parents choosing how to best raise their children is simply part of a person’s life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Only in severe cases of abuse and neglect would society (or government) have a role to step in to protect the child.

But this administration is more corrupt than the founders imagined. The insistence on challenging the Romeike decision is a way to codify the administration’s belief that parents do not have rights concerning raising their children—the government wants to make it clear that they believe they have the right to control, to indoctrinate.

Inalienable rights cannot be given up. But just as people can lose their freedom to slavery, any inalienable right can succumb to usurpers if people do not stand strong against the tyrannists. Usually the loss happens little by little. “Free” public schools have been used for the incremental usurpation of parental rights. This administration is testing how far they have already come toward the tyrannist plan to dictate what and how children are taught.

When this federal government puts forth a curriculum (as it has with Common Core), claiming it is best for all our children, it doesn’t matter what is in the curriculum and whether it could be effective as a teaching tool. Such curriculum must be rejected, because the issue is parental rights—and we know that any curriculum they provide comes from the worldview that parents do not have rights.

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* You can learn more on the Romeike case at these links: this story from 2010, this story from The Blaze March 15th, and this video with HSLDA, who are helping to defend the Romeikes.