MS FREE

A concerned Mississippi mom submitted this by message and we respect her wish to remain anonymous.
"This was sent home by Richland Elementary School in Rankin County. Rewards for grades on STAR testing."

Would this motivate your child?

A top Australian school has banned laptops in class, warning that technology “distracts’’ from old-school quality teaching.

The headmaster of Sydney Grammar School, John Vallance, yesterday described the billions of dollars spent on computers in Australian schools over the past seven years as a “scandalous waste of money’’.

“I’ve seen so many schools with limited budgets spending a disproportionate amount of their money on technology that doesn’t really bring any measurable, or non-measurable, benefits,’’ he said...

“The digital delivery of teaching materials across Australia has had a really powerful normative effect.

“It’s making it quite difficult for children to learn how to disagree, how not to toe the party line, because they can’t question things — the possibility of questioning things has been taken away from them.’’

Computers in class ‘a waste’ A top Australian school has banned laptops in class, warning that technology “distracts’’ from old-school quality teaching.

Parenting Magazine talks about HB4:

"I find this bill completely ridiculous and offensive. And apparently, I'm not alone."

If Your Kid's Teacher Graded Your Involvement, Would You Pass? If you thought you were done worrying about grades now that you're a grown-up, think again. Prepare to bring your A-game.

Message from another MS FREE member...

"Though I appreciate the theory of school choice and being able to send my daughter where I feel she should be, THESE are the children who will be left behind in this movement. There's not an immediate solution but this article points out how it's increasingly difficult to end the cycle."

http://www.scilearn.com/blog/ten-facts-about-how-poverty-impacts-education

10 Facts About How Poverty Impacts Education Education reform has been a hot topic in recent years, and leaders across the political spectrum have championed measures such as increased testing and results-based evaluation of teachers and school districts. But one of the most pervasive problems affecting public schools is rarely discussed as an…

EXPOSING THE ACCOUNTABILITY SCAM IN EDUCATION REFORM!
By Kirsten Lombard

How does ‘accountability’ deceive the public?
..Most of us make at least four key assumptions when the term is applied to education. While those assumptions are now entirely false, reformers rely on us making them:

Assumption #1: Accountability is local

Today, where it still exists at all, local control—and the local accountability that should accompany it—is increasingly a fiction... Students, teachers, schools, and districts are instead accountable to federal and state governments and preferred partners in private industry...

Assumption #2: Accountability is based on valid measures

The standardized assessments in which federal (and, in turn, state) government roots accountability have zero proven validity. Utah-based clinician Dr. Gary Thompson and others have clearly demonstrated the experimental and potentially damaging nature of Common Core-aligned assessments—though neither the creators nor the administrators of these measures have been forthcoming with such information...

Assumption #3: Accountability is concerned with academic performance

Children are not standard. Thus, at best, standardized measures could only hope to capture a time-specific sliver of information about any child’s comprehension or ability. Yet, in the name of accountability, we assess ever more and teach ever less. Lack of sleep, poor diet, difficulties at home, anxiety, and learning differences are just a few of the items for which accountability initiatives make no allowance...

Assumption #4: Accountability weeds out bad teachers, schools, and districts

Accountability systems now base teacher reviews, merit pay, status, and/or job retention heavily on student scores on standardized assessments. Yet, just as kids aren’t standard, neither are teachers or the situations they must manage on a daily, weekly, and yearly basis. To provide an honest view, solid and fair teacher evaluation cannot—and should not—be strongly rooted in standardized measures. In fact, teaching to the test is the only sure result of now-dominant models of accountability...

Evaluating and labeling schools, districts, and states as successes or failures becomes equally problematic in light of accountability’s use of psychometric measurement. “Grades” based largely on psychometrics are being used wrongly to brand children, punish teachers, close schools, and place public moneys in private hands...

Read the full article:
http://www.westernfreepress.com/2016/02/05/exposing-the-accountability-scam-in-education-reform/

The Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) is one of two owners of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS)... Despite the reality that CCSS has not taken American education by the standardizing storm that its schemers had hoped, Gates continues to fund CCSS as a pet project...

GRANT DETAILS:
Council of Chief State School Officers
Date: January 2016
Purpose: to provide for general operating support
Amount: $15,408,198
Term: 30
Topic: College-Ready
Program: United States
Grantee Location: Washington, District of Columbia
Grantee Website: http://www.ccsso.org

https://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2016/02/03/gates-gives-common-core-owner-ccsso-15-4-million-just-to-keep-em-in-business/

Amen!

The Wall Street Journal
Washington’s Next Hacking Target? (The US DOE)

"Recurring failures documented by internal and external auditors have House Oversight Chairman Jason Cheffetz warning that the agency could be Washington's next cyber-disaster... the bureaucracy now holds, among other things, 139 million Social Security numbers in its digital files.

The stakes go well beyond personal privacy... A Tuesday oversight hearing will explore the department's FAILURE TO PROTECT its information from cyber-attack... The 2015 internal audit of information security revealed more problems, including an "inability to detect unauthorized devices connecting to the network." The IG also flagged "key weaknesses' in "internal intrusion detection and prevention of system penetrations." Specifically, her team was "ABLE TO GAIN FULL ACCESS to the Department's network and our access went UNDETECTED" by both the contractor overseeing the system and the department's information office.... " (emphasis added)

Read the full story: http://www.m.wsj.com/articles/washingtons-next-hacking-target-1454371917

Sharing from DeSoto County House Rep. Steve Hopkins:
PLEASE contact your State Representative and or State Senator and report ALL cases like this that you are aware of. Please help us investigate the abuse of children with disabilities throughout the state, this type of activity is despicable and must be stopped.
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If you are not sure who your legislators are: http://www.msfree.info/legislation.html

Mississippi investigating mistreatment allegation in Biloxi schools Investigators from the Mississippi Department of Education are trying to determine whether Biloxi Public Schools has been improperly segregating, restraining and neglecting students with disabilities while failing to provide them an appropriate education as required by federal law.

From the MS FREE website. Tips on how to read a bill:

A "bill" is a proposal to create new law, change existing law, or both. All bills are broken down into "Sections."

If the beginning of the sections says, "Section xx-xx-xx, Mississippi Code of 1972 is amended as follows:" that would be a proposal to change existing law. In these sections, the entire law cited is brought forward and printed in it's entirety. These sections are often very long which is why you should watch for underlined words or ***. Underlined words show what will be added to the law, should it pass, and the *** signifies that something is being deleted.

If the Section does not begin with a law to be amended, this is a proposal to create new law and you should pay attention to everything included in that section.

See more: http://www.msfree.info/legislation.html

The House Education Committee Members' phone numbers, emails, and pictures are all located in this one convenient place here on the MS FREE website. http://www.msfree.info/house-committee.html

Be sure to bookmark it for easy reference later!

"School choice is alive and well in Mississippi. My husband and I exercise choice every month when we pay private school tuition for 3 children. We are not affluent. We prioritize, sacrifice and follow our hearts (for us the leading of the Holy Spirit).

We don't expect federal or state government to intervene on our behalf. We pay taxes for public schools as required. It's not the responsibility of any city, county, state or nation to manage the welfare of my children. It is a God-given requirement of parents. Why would we ask the very institutions whose influence we seek to remove from education to help give us "choice?"

Socio-economic status may indeed affect my children's ability to receive the best education. Again, it is my responsibility to change that, not the government's duty to even the playing field.
Our present national condition is, in no small part, due to our generation's constant whines of "take care of me" and "it's my right." We cannot demand it's removal while pleading for their help in the same breath.

I realize some families exist in a reality that precludes the normal "do whatever it takes" mentality to provide the best for their children. I also know there are those who don't care what's best. I don't have a one-size-fits-all solution, but I know more government involvement in education will NEVER create a better America for any of our children."

-MRG

Join the MOVEMENT here:
http://www.uspie.org/contact-us.html
Join the MS CHAPTER here:
www.facebook.com/groups/MSPIE

LOL

"I’m going to share this but it never came from me, the reality was that the evaluations that were done on all of the supposed competitors, Pearson was not the real winner, yet Pearson got the contract. So, that’s as simply as I can put it. So the problem is multi-faceted."

PART FOUR from Project Veritas was released today. You can view the first three videos on our page. To read more, please see this article linked below.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/01/27/exclusive-former-houghton-mifflin-exec-reveals-how-pearsons-win-of-the-lausd-ipad-deal-was-rigged/

Hidden Cam: Common Core Insider Reveals Info About LA Bid Rigging Scandal In the fourth video of this series on Common Core, undercover videographers expose some additional information about Common Core not known to the general pub...

The Senate Education Committee Members' phone numbers, emails, and pictures are all located in this one convenient place here on the MS FREE website. http://www.msfree.info/senate-committee.html

Be sure to bookmark it for easy reference later!

Corporate Education Reform Goes Global

"The U.N. has thrown its weight behind what Finnish scholar Pasi Sahlberg calls the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM). According to Sahlberg, there is a “global unified agenda” to rebuild educational systems to benefit multinational corporations. GERM began in the U.S. and United Kingdom, and has spread throughout the world. GERM is committed to educational standardization, a focus on literacy and numeracy, high-stakes testing and centralized control of the schools... To further understand the problems with the U.N.’s education agenda, it is worth examining its partnership with the British publishing corporation, Pearson."

http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2016/1/corporate-education-reform-goes-global.html

It's time to realize this is not going to end.... unless we end it ourselves.
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Four Reasons Why STUDENT PRIVACY IS IN GRAVE DANGER— Unless Congress Rejects This Bill
By: By Karen R. Effrem, MD

There is no rest for the weary. Congress continues to erode student privacy along with parental autonomy... the Strengthening Education Through Research Act (SETRA), allows the federal government to collect, analyze, and share the most intimate details about our children — the workings of their minds...

SETRA seeks to expand federal psychological profiling of our children... The US Department of Education (USED) is already in flagrant violation of the Tenth Amendment. The amount of data collected on individual children, families, and teachers via USED through this law and the weakening... of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment (PPRA)... is appalling and [violates] the Fourth Amendment as well...

Both ESRA and SETRA refer to FERPA (20 USC 1232g)... and require data privacy to be handled according to that law. However, FERPA passed in 1974 long before the presence of interoperable databases and cloud computing. It also only discusses sanctions on entities that mishandle the data and those [sanctions], which used to include fines and imprisonment, were severely weakened when ESRA was passed in 2002. Students, families, and teachers whose sensitive personal and family data about everything from “social and emotional” issues to genetic data in newborn screening data have no redress...

(Current law) prohibits the collection of psychological, political, religious, and other sensitive data in surveys, but not in curriculum and assessments such as in Common Core...

Read the entire article:
http://thepulse2016.com/karen-r-effrem/2016/01/04/13210/

We ought be cautious in Mississippi, having adopted some of Florida's policies in the recent past. -BC
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Six Reasons Jeb’s Plan Fails to End Federal Tyranny in Education
By Karen R. Effrem, MD (Pediatrician)

Former Florida Governor and presidential candidate Jeb Bush released his education plan on January 18th. In it, he tries hard to sound like he cares about and supports local control and parental autonomy. In fact, the document, on pre-K through grade 12 issues, is merely a kinder, gentler form of federal tyranny that continues unconstitutional government involvement in pre-K, high stakes testing, data mining, and K-12 education in general. The plan fails on multiple important fronts:

1.) Federal Involvement in Education
Since its creation in 1979, the U.S. Department of Education (US DOE) has done untold damage to academic excellence, state sovereignty, and parental rights. At least $2 trillion have been spent with no improvement in academic achievement...

2.) Preschool... A plethora of studies, including from Head Start, show that preschool is at best temporarily beneficial, and at worst, both academically and emotionally harmful.

3.) Title I and IDEA Portability
This idea of having federal funds follow children to private schools will result in federal and state public school standards and tests (Common Core) and other invasive, ineffective programs and regulations invade private schools and even home schools, resulting in a loss of these escape hatches from the government system...

4.) Data Collection and Data Privacy
As the national foundation he started is a good partner in the Data Quality Campaign (DQC) and has several of the same corporate funders, and his state foundation was in favor of a very invasive Florida data mining bill in 2013, the Bush plan promotes much student data collection...

5.) Promotion of Charter Schools
The document strongly supports charter schools, which are still public schools that are required to teach the same public school standards and tests, mostly related to Common Core; are less accountable to parents and the public; and are strongly supported by Bush political allies and contributors, because they are a profit making enterprises. Yet, they have a very mixed record academically.

6.) Continued Dependence on High Stakes Testing
The plan continues the same “teach to the test” mentality with school grades and teacher evaluations that Bush started in Florida that has become impossibly complicated and corrupt and has shifted the emphasis from teaching to testing.

Read the full article:
http://thepulse2016.com/karen-r-effrem/2016/01/20/review-of-the-jeb-bush-education-plan-continued-federal-control/

KrisAnne Hall is coming to Mississippi! The event will be held in DeSoto County. Please consider attending. Reserve your free tickets today at:
www.desoto3c.com

Vouchers ~ School Choice or Government Control?
By: KrisAnne Hall

"Proponents of vouchers professes that individuals motivated by “religious convictions” want to send their children to Christian schools and cannot afford to do so, so we need the tax dollars they pay for public education to be “reimbursed” to them to be used for Christian school education. However, vouchers are not a “reimbursement” of the money paid in taxes, they are a government subsidy. When the government subsidizes a program they have the obligation to regulate it. A private Christian school teaching the principles of Christianity and the principles of creationism will soon have to stop teaching those things, if they want to operate using government funding. To do otherwise would compel those who do not share those convictions to provide funding for them...

Many of our founders believed that tax dollars should not be used to support anyone’s religious education, Christians, Jews, Pagans, or Muslims. In our ignorance, we are repeating a battle in American history that our founders already fought and settled. Shortly after the ratification of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, several legislators, Patrick Henry being one, put forth a bill to pay Christian Teachers with tax dollars. The bill was titled, A Bill Establishing A Provision for Teachers of the Christian Religion. The purpose of this bill was to pay Christian teachers’ salaries out of collected tax revenue. Patrick Henry was a great defender of Liberty and an ardent Christian. In this case, his desire to defend the faith blinded him to the dangers of inviting the government into the church in the form of tax subsidies. Fortunately, there were other legislators present that knew the dangers of such an act, and their stand helped to clarify why good intentions can lead to dangerous destinations.

To understand why it is wrong for tax dollars to pay for Christian education, we must really think about the process as a whole. When tax dollars are used to pay someone’s salary, those people become government employees. We like to argue that people who are paid with tax dollars are employees of the “citizens”, but when they get their paychecks they do not call themselves “citizen employees” they call themselves “State employees” or “federal employees”. And when the government is their employer, the government has the right to dictate and regulate their employment practices; from the curriculum they teach, to the teachers they hire, and even the students they educate. Since, tax dollars are not the property of the government but of the American people, the American people cannot allow the government to spend their money with no accountability. Therefore, regulation of government spending of taxpayer dollars is required. So, to take tax dollars invites government regulation, influence and control into the Christian schools...

I am amazed that even in light of the current battle to keep the government out of our churches in the matter of healthcare mandates, that Christians can even consider demanding government money for programs established upon religious convictions. Haven’t we seen well enough that where the government is invited in, it will soon run the house? How can we with clear conscience declare the government has no right to force a religion to operate outside its conscience and provide healthcare contrary to its beliefs and with the same body demand the government give the Christian schools money?..."

Read the entire article:
http://krisannehall.com/vouchers-school-choice-government-control/

Check out the latest addition to the MS FREE website! The page was designed to serve as a tutorial on how to navigate the MS Legislature's website.

Legislature To stay up to date with what is going on in our State Capitol, it is imperative we know how to navigate the website. Through the website, we can access all the information necessary to contact our...

In 1961, "We [the undersigned] reject, furthermore, the philosophy that there can exist federal aid to any degree without federal control... Since we do not desire such federal control in the field of public education, we do not desire federal aid to education. We should never permit the American educational system to become the vehicle for experimentation by educational idealogues. A careful analysis of the writings and statements of vocal and influential spokesmen in the governmental and educational fields indicates a desire on the part of some of these individuals to utilize the educational system as a means of transforming the economic and social outlook of the United States."

-Testimony found in accompanying documents to the "National Defense Education Act," Amendment of 1961.
Iserbyt, Charlotte. Deliberate Dumbing Down of America.

Some Mississippi legislators are already claiming that Common Core State Standards are gone in MS. Please do not believe this false information. To review the Math and English "MS College and Career Readiness Standards" and compare them to the "Common Core State Standards," please visit our website: http://www.msfree.info/sources.html

You will see the standards were simply renamed.

Mr. Fitz Gets Depressed
By David Lee Finkle

There is an epidemic of teacher depression, demoralization and stress in this country, and for a while I was part of it.

The series of comic strips I have assembled below, is, at least for me, the most important series I have ever done. Drawing it meant I was past the events that inspired it. More importantly, I think drawing it may have helped some other teachers who have felt the same way I did know they were not alone...

Standardized testing became the sole focus of education. Then came standardized teaching. Curriculum maps were written. Workbooks were distributed. All the things that had made me a great teacher — creativity, coming up with my own lessons and assignments, finding just the right resources to teach what needed to be taught — became liabilities. It was like having the rug pulled out from under me. Meanwhile, we were having our evaluations tied to our test scores. But if I had no autonomy over how or what I taught — how was I responsible for the results? Pretty much every single reform scheme designed to improve schools and teachers instead interfered with my ability to teach. They didn’t encourage me to teach better. They depressed me...

Read more:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2013/07/24/a-teacher-gets-depressed-a-real-story-in-comics/