The Wunderlich Family’s Homeschool Fight (Video)

Posted on December 13, 2014 by A.P. Dillon

This past November, Germany’s Supreme Court has created criminal charges and penalties for parents who do not send their child to public school.  In the case of the Wunderlich’s, the government seized not only their bank account, but their children.

Those of you who followed my updates on the Romeike family and their quest for asylum in the United States due to homeschool persecution in Germany, you need to watch this video from the Homeschool League Defense Association (HSLDA) on the Wunderlich’s.  Read their story here.

Video Description:

Published on Dec 9, 2014

In August 2013, about 20 German police officers and social workers burst into Dirk and Petra’s home and forcibly removed their four children—all because they were homeschooling. Their fight continues. Watch their story and learn how you can help.

Help support homeschool freedom everywhere: http://www.hslda.org/freedom

For more background on the Wunderlich’s story: www.hslda.org/wunderlich

Posted in A.P. Dillon (LL1885), EDUCATION, Homeschool, Video | Tagged | Comments Off on The Wunderlich Family’s Homeschool Fight (Video)

NC Governor’s Video Has Your Spit-take Of The Week

Posted on December 12, 2014 by A.P. Dillon

Governor McCrory is clearly getting on the campaign horse as evidenced by this touchy-feely video on education.  Near the end of the video, McCrory makes the following statement:

“The biggest piece of feedback that I hear from teachers is, ‘they’re not letting us teach anymore. We’re just giving tests.’. We’re gonna.. we’re gonna end this duplication of testing. Which neither helps the students nor allows the teacher to teach.”

Yeah.. right.

The Opt Out or iRefuse movement is starting in North Carolina. To me, this seems like a move to get out in front of the protests and make it look like a parade instead.

Parents, check out the testing calendar for North Carolina.
I live in Wake County, so here is that calendar.  Mind you, I’ve already written about the 95 some-odd assessments and tests given to third graders in our county. See the bottom half of this article for more on those 95 assessments.

So, if testing is allegedly going to be whittled down, then why is North Carolina still a member of the Common Core high stakes testing consortium known as the SBAC?

No one seems to want to answer that question or the question of how the field tests done in NC were funded.

Remember folks, Governor McCrory is all on Common Core.

Common Core has assessments already embedded in it, as I’ve shown you. The SBAC is another layer on top of that. If it weren’t for the legislature choking off the SBAC funding, our kids would be taking those tests too.

 

Related Reads:

Posted in A.P. Dillon (LL1885), Common Core, Pat McCrory, Video | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Common Core Aligned: Front Row Education

Posted on December 12, 2014 by A.P. Dillon

CommonCoreAligned“…to create just these kinds of tests—next-generation assessments aligned to the common core. When the tests are aligned to the common standards, the curriculum will line up as well—and that will unleash powerful market forces in the service of better teaching.” – Bill Gates, 2009 Speech To Natl. Conference of State Legislatures

The goal is to align everything so that students and the money have nowhere to go but Common Core.

 

“Front Row Education Inc.”
Another “free app” aligned to Common Core for teachers “grappling” with Common Core math that emphasizes more student “personalization” through “Data driven teaching”.

From the Front Row Education website:

Common Core Aligned

With Front Row, you can be sure that every single problem your students are working on is based on the Common Core. Our advanced break-down of the Common Core ensures that a student doesn’t miss any part of a standard that would later prevent him or her from advancing.

Standards-based Report Cards

With Front Row, you no longer need to generate math report cards by hand. The application knows where each student stands with respect to the Common Core and gives you immediate access to their report cards. Use this feature to save hours that you would otherwise need to individually test every student assess his or her ability. Front Row takes care of it for you!

Good luck finding out much about Front Row Education on their own website. There is no “about” page but they do have their terms of service linked.  Below is what I did find.

Front Row Education is a 501(c)(3) started in 2012 by two former Microsoft employees; Sidarth Kakkar and Alexandr Kurilin.

Their current ‘educator content’ contributor, Bill Fickett, is a Teach for America alum, as was his predecessor, Jackson Edwards.

 

Good luck finding their 990 forms or much about who is giving them money. I dug around a bit, but because they were formed in 2012, there isn’t much out there.  Their initial seed money looks to have come in two waves according to Crunchbase. Two main investors were Kapor Capital and Imagine K12.

Kapor Capital’s team is worth looking at.  Notables include former head of the NAACP, Ben Jealous and the founding partner and namesake for the company has invested heavily in ‘free apps’ focused on Common Core.  It would appear that Imagine K12 is investing in many of the same ‘free app’ companies.

A list of additional individual investors can be found at Angel.co’s website.  Note the video on the Angel.co profile page.

I tracked down Front Row Education’s EIN and non-profit filing address:

EIN – 45-4877584
13104 Willow Street Road
Fairfax VA 22033-0000

Another address was found through an American Express giving site:

Front Row Education Inc
1655 Fort Myer Drive
Suite 700
Arlington, VA 22209

On the American Express page, the company name has a hyperlink which it takes you to a detailed set of information about where your donation might go. This information includes contact data, where the email address is a “.org”  versus the Front Row Education website’s “.com” ending. This information at the American Express site mirrors the data at Guidestar. See below:

EIN: 45-4877584
Chief Executive: Ingrid Staudenmeyer
Contact: Peggy Hamilton, Director of Programs
Telephone: 703 -672-0207
E-mail: peggy@frontroweducation.org
Ruling Year: 2013

According to a WHOIS I performed on their website, the filing address and the Amex Donation address do not match the registration address of the site:

Registrant Name: ALEXANDR KURILIN
Registrant Organization: FRONT ROW EDUCATION, INC
Registrant Street: 417 A ST #418  
Registrant City: DALY CITY
Registrant State/Province: CALIFORNIA
Registrant Postal Code: 94014

 

 

 

Posted in A.P. Dillon (LL1885), Common Core | Tagged | 1 Comment

Facebook Page: ‘Teach Stupid People About Common Core’

Posted on December 12, 2014 by A.P. Dillon

Satire page or created by a real Common Core supporter channeling Jonathan Gruber?

Parents For Common Core Facebook page description:

“Common Core gets a bad rap from parents that are too dumb to understand it. We will try and teach these stupid people that this is right for their kids.”

Oh, so calling parents concerned about their kids stupid is going to change their mind about Common Core? Let us know how that strategy is working out for you, will you?

By the way, it’s not “try and teach”, it’s try TO teach.  ELA fail there, my friend.

Grandad Learns About CC MemeIs this page taking notes from that hot mess of a video mocking a veteran grandpa? If it’s not a satire page, then one has to ask that question; same theme but on steroids.

In case you missed Grandpa, here’s the story and video clip.

 

The Parents For Common Core Page equates homeschoolers with a serial killer is going to be just that thing to bring parents around to the wonders of this fundamentally flawed experiment, right?

Let’s help the Parents For Common Core Facebook page. They tried to hard to make a meme, but they’re doing it wrong. This is how you do it.

Also, the fail is so, so strong in the one below. We have done our research, hence the opposition? DERP.

UPDATE: A related must read — “Me stupid parent. Me family live in cave. Me need Common Core save us. Unga bunga! Hahahahahahahaha!”

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | 2 Comments

A Common Core Informational Text Candidate

Posted on December 11, 2014 by A.P. Dillon

This Argus Leader article could potentially be used as a Common Core informational text candidate. Consider it is a ‘credible source’ and as such, acceptable to use in a classroom under Common Core.

In the Argus Leader article, reporter named Patrick Anderson asks a teacher a question or two. Some parents are also questioned.  Parents, pay attention to the question first asked in this “informational text” candidate at the Argus Leader:

What changed for you when the standards were implemented?

I know that I’ve focused on trying to bring in more newspaper articles, news-sourced articles on a topic. For example, I was talking to you about Civil Disobedience, that’s an older document by Henry David Thoreau. And what I had the students do was I gave them some reading focus points … And so we did that as an academic portion of American literature. But then I had them go find articles from credible sources where Americans have exercised civil disobedience and what was their reason and what were the results, and that’s more of what I started to do.

Because I can’t ignore what’s in our curriculum. And I don’t want to ignore it, but I think we live in a time where it needs to be relevant.

Current events are important, however Common Core’s insistence on selective and often subjective “informational texts” is both forcing and influencing the issue.

The teacher, Brown, who says she sends her kids to ‘credible sources’?  What sources?  What is the criteria used to determine if they are ‘credible’ or not? The author of this article doesn’t press Brown on this.

Happy to see Thoreau in there. Ironic since his essay of opposition to the Mexican war, Civil Disobedience, opens up with the quote “That government is best which governs least” in its opening sentence; Common Core is arguably government trying to govern more. Having said that, Civil Disobedience has multiple historical and definitive facets to it. Comparing those historical and definitive facets to what is being called ‘civil disobedience’ today is arguably going to be slanted by reading ‘informational texts” such from unnamed ‘credible sources’.

Then at the end we have a parent saying their kid’s teacher is showing CNN and some of it is inappropriate. Why was there no follow-up on that in this article?

If this article were to be considered a ‘credible source’ or an “informational text”, the student using it is going to get a skewed picture.

Posted in Common Core | 1 Comment

EXCLUSIVE: USAF Major (Ret.) Told He Can’t Watch FNC at Med Facility

Posted on December 10, 2014 by Liberty Speaks
Liberty Speaks

Liberty Speaks

 
 
 

I read a status update on Facebook the other day that a close personal friend of the family had posted.  It read:

December 4th, 2014 : Currently inside a military medical treatment facility watching FOX news when a military member says “I am not allowed to let you watch this channel and have to change it to something more neutral”

After reading this, I messaged him and asked more questions regarding the incident and he was more than happy to discuss it.  I asked permission to post the story on this blog and permission was given.   He is a retired Major with the USAF, as well as retired Law Enforcement and has asked to remain anonymous so I will not release his name.

The Major was sitting in a waiting area at Wilford Hall Medical Center,  Lackland A.F.B. in San Antonio,  watching Fox News  (the TV was already on the channel when he arrived).  At around 9:00 am he was approached by two junior military members;  a Tech Sargent (E-6) and a Staff Sargent (E-5).  One of them said to him

“I am not allowed to let you watch this channel and have to change it to something more neutral”

When questioned why the channel needed to be changed from the Fox News Channel the reply was that they would

 “get in trouble like last time a senior officer saw it on their TV in the waiting area”

The Major told the two non-commissioned officers that if any senior officers walked into the waiting room to see Fox News on the TV, for them to say that he changed it and that he would take the blame.  According to the Major, this conversation was over heard by at least one other military member in the room.  The Fox News Channel remained on in the waiting room, though he did not know what happened once he left that area.

When I saw his original post my first reaction to the statement “I am not allowed to let you watch this channel” was you have got to be kidding.  The irony was not lost on me.  Here is a man who spent most his life protecting the First Amendment rights of other individuals when in the Military as well as the community he served while as a police officer.  Now he is being told he cannot watch a specific news channel.  That’s irony.  To give full disclosure on this, I do watch FOX on a regular basis, however, I would still be writing this post if it were CNN, MSNBC or any other news channel being scrutinized or “prohibited”.

The second word that stands out to me is “neutral“.  Who is deciding what is neutral to watch?  What “neutral” channel should the TV in the waiting room be on?  Nickelodeon?  QVC? How about the Food Network?  The only channel out there that remotely can be described as neutral is The Weather Channel.  If they are talking a “neutral” News channel, guess what, that animal does not exist.

I personally wanted some clarity on this issue so I  reviewed the centers website for any policies regarding this and have not been successful.  I then reached out to the 59th Medical Wing Facebook page for comment regarding regulations on what may or may not be watched in their waiting rooms at the Wilford Hall Medical Center.  My Facebook question was this:

To the 59th Medical Wing: I would like to know what your regulations are regarding what may or may not be watched on TV in your waiting rooms at the medical facility? I await your comment

I received a reply 3 hours later on Via Facebook:

Thank you of your interest in the 59th Medical Wing. Please contact our public affairs office directly via email at 59mdw.pa@us.af.mil for policy information.

I sent an email asking what is policy at their facility regarding what can and can not be watched in a waiting room?  Is it up to the visitors and patients to turn the TV on, change the channel etc? Do they leave it up to those who use the facility to decide what is watched on the TV’s?  I received a reply from Joe Bela, Director of Public affairs, 59th medical Wing, via Email and the entire exchange is below.

I have reached out to my military contacts on Twitter, Facebook as well as my personal friends to see if this is a common occurrence or policy at Military Medical Centers.  It has been relayed to me, by more than a few individuals, that in the VA/Med Centers the waiting room TV’s are usually on the News, either tuned to CNN, FNC, or the local stations provided in their community.  Wilford Hall facility at this time seems to be in the minority regarding viewing policy.

According to Mr. Bela’s email reply, patients were demanding news channels be shown based on their political beliefs and the facility administrators were getting complaints from all sides.  So what was their solution?   No News on the TV.

I understand attempting to please everyone by prohibiting news stations,  however, this facility is funded by taxpayers and the policy should be reexamined.   The news, though hardly ever neutral in nature, is the window to current and breaking events.   In many cases, it disseminates information regarding emergencies and public safety announcements.  If anything, your patients should be allowed to view these channels for just such situations.

Our current and retired military members are not only Heroes, but they are adults and should be able to make the decision for themselves what they wish to watch.   It is insulting to their service and is reminiscent of the Orwellian ‘Thought Police’.  They, of all people, should not be told what channels are permitted or what news channels should be or should not be viewed out of political correctness and/or appeasement.

With all due respect, I urge a better solution.

 

It is this Seal that represents ALL of us

Great_Seal_of_the_US_Icon_Not this one

thoughtpolice

 

SIDENOTE:

Update-

In June 2014 a Fresno VA facility came under fire for blocking Fox News from its channel list in their waiting rooms.  Reporter Erik Rosales with KMPH had an exchange with VA Hospital Public Affairs Director Sheryl Grubb.  The questions and answers are very interesting.  Here is part of that interview:

…Because the VA Hospital in Fresno and other VA Hospitals and clinic across the country operate with the help of your tax dollars, no matter what side of the fence you’re on it brings into question Freedom of Speech and censorship.

VA Hospital Chief of Public Affairs Director Sheryl Grubb says.

“Thanks to you, yes we found out that Fox News was blocked out from one of waiting areas. It was just a misunderstanding. We’ve had a lot of veterans with diverse personalities. A lot of veterans complaining about one news station or the other, so the intent was really to be fair and equitable and take all stations off.”

Reporter Erik Rosales says,

“At the same time with you guys receiving tax dollars, this VA hospital cannot censor things like that?”

Grubb says,

“That’s right. You are very right. Obviously that was our mistake.”

 

 

Thank you to Grumpy Opinions for linking

Thank you Doug Ross@Journal for linking

Posted in EXCLUSIVE, Government, Liberty Speaks, Poltical Correctness | Tagged | 6 Comments