Browsing articles in "Federal Education"

The National Pulse: Insanity: After Repeated Failures, Bill Gates to Spend $1.7 Billion More on Education

Dr. Karen Effrem unfolds the finer points, dangers and efforts of the Gates’ education failures.

When our children make egregious mistakes that harm others and cost money, we try to explain to them why they are on the wrong path and then hope and pray that they see the error of their ways. Unfortunately, Gates and his ilk are insulated from reality by their vast fortunes. So while we fight to protect our children’s education and futures from the effects of Gates’ Common Core and data mining efforts, we must pray that he finds some other cause in which to meddle and that our officials at all levels learn that these grants come with all sorts of costly strings, cause many problems, and are a very dangerous addiction. We must stand strong, speak truth to power — and believe in miracles.

Insanity: After Repeated Failures, Bill Gates to Spend $1.7 Billion More on Education

 

The National Pulse: Congress: Dear Parents Don’t Need the Government’s Help to Raise Their Children

by: Dr. Karen Effrem

The progressives in the federal government are very good at “not letting a crisis go to waste,” especially in relation to the disastrous government-created crisis of single-parent families. After subsidizing illegitimacy since the 1960s, 40 percent of families in the U.S. are headed by single parents.

So what is the Left’s solution? Instead of reversing those catastrophic policies by promoting two-parent family formation as welfare programs are reformed, they are sending government agents into homes to tell parents how to raise their children according to government standards. And while they are at it, they are collecting all sorts of data on children and their families to see how it is all working out.

https://thenationalpulse.com/commentary/dear-congress-parents-dont-need-governments-help-raise-their-children/

 

Sep 19, 2017
ELW

Submit Federal Education Privacy Comments by 9-20 at 11:59 PM!

We now have an opportunity to protect the privacy and minds of our children. We can submit comments in support of President Trump’s effort to scale back regulations, particularly in the U.S. Department of Education on several of these topics. All comments must be submitted by 11:59 PM on Wednesday, September 20th at this website:  https://www.regulations.gov/comment?D=ED-2017-OS-0074-0001.
Here are two big areas of “fed ed” regulations. There are more detailed comments below that you may add if you want to, but all you really need to do is to ask for 1) Withdrawal of all the FERPA regulatory changes made to 34 CFR, Part 99 that went into effect in January of 2012 and 2) Enforcement of the statutory prohibition on assessing “attitudes and beliefs” of a student or their family in ESSA’s state mandated assessments or in the NAEP.
Thank you for what you can do and for your efforts to protect the hearts and minds of children!
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Detailed Additional Information for Potential Comments
1) FERPA – Withdraw the regulatory changes to FERPA that went into effect in 2012. This would prevent USED, state agencies, and schools from disclosing personally identifiable information (PII) to literally anyone in the world, without parental consent or even notification, if the disclosing entity uses the correct language to justify the disclosure. Ask USED to:

Restore the longstanding, pre-2012 definitions and interpretations of an “authorized representative,” “education program,” and other terms.

Stop a state department of education or other agency that receives PII for other purposes from redisclosing that data to other entities, such as researchers, without parental consent.

Restore the audit exception so that the requirement (previously contained in 34 CFR §99.35(a)(2)) that in order for a state or local educational authority to conduct an audit, evaluation, or compliance or enforcement activity, it must demonstrate authority to do so under some federal, state, or local grant of authority.

2) Enforce the statutes prohibiting the assessment of “attitudes and beliefs” in surveys associated with ESSA’s mandated state tests and in the NAEP.
Such surveys (which are being administered without parental consent) violate one or both of the following:

ESSA [20 U.S.C. §6311(b)(2)(B)(iii)] requiring statewide assessments to “objectively measure academic achievement, knowledge, and skills, and be tests that do not evaluate or assess personal or family beliefs and attitudes or disclose personally identifiable information.” There is identical language in the Education Sciences Reform Act that covers the NAEP [20 USC §9622(b)(5)(A)]

PPRA [20 U.S.C. §1232h(b)(1-8)], which requires parental review and consent for surveys in federally funded education programs that ask about 8 sensitive items, including mental health, illegal or anti-social behavior; or sexual behavior or attitudes.

Jul 28, 2017
ELW

The Pulse – Congress Ignores Obvious Problems with State-Run Preschool at Hearing

 

Dr. Effrem’s latest article at the National Pulse discusses a recent U.S. House education subcommittee hearing on preschool that except for one courageous congressman, Rep. Thomas Garrett (R-VA), completely failed to mention the utter failure of Head Start and other government preschool programs. Here is an excerpt:

The Failure of Head Start and State-Run Preschool

The 2012 follow-up study that followed the same children as in the 2010 study through third grade instead of stopping at first grade also found no benefits of Head Start after the preschool year(s):

Looking across the full study period, from the beginning of Head Start through 3rd grade, the evidence is clear that access to Head Start improved children’s preschool outcomes across developmental domains, but had few impacts on children in kindergarten through 3rd grade.

The 2010 and 2012 studies are just two examples of literally hundreds of government studies showing the failure and/or harm of Head Start. This sampling dates back to 1985 and includes a government review of 600 studies from 1997 that could not find any benefit of the program, saying:

The body of research on current Head Start is insufficient to draw conclusions about the impact of the national program.

This of course does not even begin to discuss the numerous studies showing ineffectiveness, fade-out of beneficial effects, and actual academic and emotional harm of preschool programs other than Head Start. And despite what Rep. Polis says, quality of the Head Start program makes no difference.  The 2014 study of Head Start examined the effect of quality on program outcomes and found:

We find little evidence that quality matters to impacts of Head Start using the available quality measures from the study across two age cohorts, three quality dimensions, five outcomes, and several years. The one exception is that for 3-year-old program entrants low exposure quality, defined as less exposure to academic activities during Head Start participation, produces better behavioral impacts in the short-run than more exposure to academic activities. Even so, there is no indication that either high quality Head Start or low quality Head Start in any dimension leads to program impacts lasting into third grade. [Emphasis added]

It is also important to remember that concept of “quality preschool” leading to better outcomes is only a myth:

The hearing witness from Minnesota, Ericca Maas, represents the organization that has been pushing that state’s scholarship program based on the ratings of the QRIS for several years. To receive a 3- or 4-star rating in Minnesota system, required for parents to use state scholarship funds with that provider, the provider must use Minnesota’s early childhood content standards that until this year discussed gender identity and environmentalism with children as young as three. The new version still discusses the environment and adds in family structure diversity under the still subjective and controversial social emotional category.

It is interesting to note that even though Minnesota’s statist model to impose these controversial standards on private, religious, and family childcare programs is lauded by pre-K proponents as a model for the feds to fund and for states to emulate, when asked during the hearing if the program has closed achievement gaps, Maas admitted unequivocally that it had not (1:17:08).

As Congress works on the budget, it is important to remind your representative and senators about the abject failure of government pre-K and home visiting programs and in the current $20 trillion debt, increasing the funding for Head Start, as is currently being proposed in the House appropriations bill makes very little sense.

Read the full article here.