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Weekly Math UpdatesAugust 29, 2007 Contents:
ASD's Great Saxon Deception pt. 2 - A recipe to intentionally kill a program If you haven't read part one of the Saxon Deception, here's a link to the page where you can see the blatent attempt by the school district to flunk Saxon out of the running so that NO school could even have an opportunity to choose it. http://www.oaknorton.com/mathupdates/20070308.cfm Part 2 of this story now continues. I've waited months to share this with you...partly because I wanted this whole thing to go away and I hoped that the new state standards would be up to par. If you do not recall, Barry Graff, in an effort to calm the citizens of Orem who wanted to split from the school district, stood in an Orem city council meeting about a year and a half ago and said every school would have a chance to choose from a traditional and standards-based math program. The problem was, he and the other representatives had no intention of letting that happen. They hand picked the teachers that served on the committee and picked the ones with strong constructivist leanings to review Saxon. In documents obtained through a GRAMA request, here is the 6th grade evaluation performed in ASD. This individual scored it at only a 38% correlation to the state standards. Note her editorial comments on the last page of the evaluation: 6th Grade Saxon Evaluation in ASD - Click to download pdf
Just what you would expect to see from someone fully indoctrinated in constructivist lies from a department of education. The committee completely ignored the fact that 8 out of 10 of the top math schools in the state use Saxon and that the state has on file a correlation showing Saxon's 6th grade at or near 100% correlation with state standards. Once again, ASD has shown they have no respect for parents. They are the "educators" and will be *darned in the extreme* if they don't tell us what's good for us and force us to swallow it as we saw a couple weeks ago when they passed out Investigations math teacher manuals and then had district-wide training to help all the teachers be very familiar with how to use it in the classroom with their Scott Foresman AW materials.
City Council Members to Vote for I hope this helps motivate you to get very active for the next couple weeks. The primary elections are coming up and there are candidates that you need to support in Orem. You must get out and vote for these three and get as many of your neighbors to vote for them as well. If you go to the primary and vote you have an incredible chance to make sweeping change when hardly any people go vote. If everyone from the Orem School District list went out and voted for these people, there is a real chance you could knock out people from the council that voted to not let you decide if you wanted to split from ASD. The names are:
If you live in Lehi, please consider voting for Craig Laurence who has been a long-time supporter of our movement and is strong toward constitutional government.
Vern Henshaw's Apparent Love for Democracy Explained I received an interesting set of links from one of our signers that may shed some light on why Vern Henshaw, ASD's superintendent, felt so strongly about pushing the phrase "Educating all students to ensure the future of our Democracy." Vern is a member of the NNER, the National Network for Educational Renewal. Among the stated goals of the NNER we find:
I always wondered where Vern got that work "enculturating" when he used it in one of the newsletters ASD sent out. Among the operational goals of the NNER we read:
Looking into the "Agenda for Education in a Democracy" we find:
In other words, the NNER not only doesn't recognize our form of government, but actively promotes forms contrary to our Republic and actively works to subvert it. Vern Henshaw served for a time on the Executive Committee of the NNER. From the minutes of a June 2006 meeting we read (link to minutes)
Vern Henshaw's membership in this organization is both troubling and enlightening when viewed in light of events that have taken place in ASD. He shows his true colors on this issue when he and the district ignore the will of parents on math. There is no democracy in ASD, it's simple communism where the rulers tell us what to do in our homes (don't teach kids the times tables) and they'll indoctrinate, sorry, enculturate our children in schools as to what they need to do to understand the advantages of a socialist lifestyle. Here are additional links should you wish to read more on this. It seems BYU was one of the first schools to sign on to this which may explain why so many people believe the education college there is overly liberal...or perhaps overtly liberal. http://education.byu.edu/cites/nner/mission.html
Star Trek the Original Series Returns...made by fans http://www.startreknewvoyages.com/index.html Check this out. Fans built a set and started making more of the original series episodes and big name help jumped in and it's all free to download. It looks pretty impressive with guest appearances from the actual Star Trek actors/actresses and music and special effects by pros all contributing to the effort. This is the key we've been missing in our math fight. The show that jump-started engineering careers for a generation is back. Now all we have to do is stream it into the schools and indoctrinate our children that their future is among the stars, pushing lots of colored buttons and dealing with those pesky Klingons. If you click this next link, then click on the link to the news coverage to see what they've done. Pretty cool. Even the news reporter got a cameo. Ahhh, the benefits of being in the news media. An admiralty commission without the hard work of moving up the chain of command.... http://www.startreknewvoyages.com/news.html
Media Articles School suspends boy for sketching gun (Mesa, AZ) http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070822/ap_on_re_us/brf_gun_sketch_suspension_1 Utah County School Revenues Up
Criticism of math standards irks board
Utah ACT scores beat U.S. average - but most students still short of collegiate standards
Unfortunately the article missed reporting the demographic scores showing Utah is BELOW national average when comparing races to each other. Marriage in California Could End?
Sincerely, Oak Norton If this email was forwarded to you, please go here and sign the petition to get on my mailing list. |
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