“Clarification of David Barton’s Statements on The Glenn Beck Show”
by Donna Garner
CSCOPE and Common Core Standards are both Type #2 (to see the definitions of Type #1 and Type #2 -- http://nocompromisepac.ning.com/profiles/blogs/type-1-and-type-2-two-completely-different-philosophies-of?xg_source=activity ). That is why Common Core Standards has made overtures to purchase CSCOPE. They are both cut out of the same mold.
At this time, CSCOPE is only in Texas; but it is a Type #2 curriculum and has been foisted successfully on 70% to 80% of Texas’ public schools through the marketing arm of the Education Service Centers. The ESC directors got no permission from the Texas Legislature nor from the Texas Education Agency to set up a non-profit corporation called the TESCCC. They used Texans’ tax dollars to form a private company that has no phone number, no address, no location, no employees, and no money going in and out of the bank – in other words “a shell company.” The ESC directors set themselves up as the board of directors for TESCCC; millions of dollars paid by school districts to rent CSCOPE are going into someone’s pockets somewhere.
ESC employees market CSCOPE to all of the school districts in their regions throughout the state. It is widely believed that TESCCC was set up to conceal the Type #2 curriculum being shoved into Texas schools secretively.
Common Core Standards views CSCOPE, which is completely digitized, as another way to drive CCS into school districts throughout the entire country.
Texas has excellent, new Social Studies curriculum standards (TEKS) which David Barton and other historians helped the elected members of the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) to adopt on 5.21.10.
The Type #2 examples that David Barton gave in his 3.7.13 presentation on the Glenn Beck Show (http://www.glennbeck.com/2013/03/07/exposing-cscope-the-controversial-education-program-indoctrinating-texas-students/ ) were the Type #2 elements the Social Studies TEKS writing teams tried to implement into the standards back in 2010, but thankfully they were not successful.
The 15 SBOE members managed to garner enough votes among them to oust those Type #2 examples that David Barton presented on the Glenn Beck Show. Consequently, Texas’ new Social Studies TEKS are the most fact-based and patriotic in the entire United States.
At the end of David Barton’s presentation on the Glenn Beck Show, Barton clarified that the examples he presented are not in our new Social Studies TEKS. I wish he had made this clear at the beginning of his presentation because I am afraid some viewers were left with the impression that Texas has retained those Type #2 elements in its standards. We have not.
We grassroots citizens have dug out examples that prove CSCOPE is not aligned with our new TEKS (English, Science, Social Studies, Math); but the promoters of CSCOPE have misrepresented their product to Texas school administrators, saying that CSCOPE is indeed going to get Texas students ready for the new Type #1 STAAR/End-of-Course Tests. Guess what! The most recently released STAAR/EOC scores (2010-11 school year) indicate that a myriad of CSCOPE schools throughout the state did very poorly on those tests.
Because CSCOPE has been kept secret from the public, it has taken us grassroots citizens almost a year to be able to “pry open” those digitized lessons to see what is in them. CSCOPE maintained its secrecy through gag orders placed on teachers, portals, and secret passwords.
Once revealed, the public is outraged at the CSCOPE content; and Texas Senators have proposed SB 1406 in an attempt to bring the whole miserable CSCOPE/TESCCC system out into the open. Our hope is that when all of the lessons are made public and the TESCCC is dissolved, CSCOPE will lose its marketing edge, never to be seen again.
Good Type #1 textbooks built upon the new English TEKS are now available to Texas schools; and the money that is presently being wasted on CSCOPE will hopefully be redirected instead to help schools to purchase the new Type #1 textbooks (i.e., instructional materials).
The GOOD NEWS is that we as Texas grassroots citizens have been able to uncover CSCOPE and squelch it in our state because it is a state entity. CSCOPE is supposed to be aligned with our state-adopted curriculum standards but is not.
The BAD NEWS is that Common Core Standards is a federal initiative that is tied to the Obama administration. The national standards, national curriculum, national teacher evaluation system, and national student database are entities created by Washington, D. C. and not by the states. Where does a grassroots citizen go to confront a national system? Nowhere…this is exactly why our country has laws that forbid Washington, D. C. from dictating what is to be taught in our local school classrooms. The problem is that Obama and his administration operate outside the law.
We must make it clear to our Congressmen that it is in their power to stop Obama. The House controls appropriations. All they would have to do is to quit funding the Common Core Standards Initiative. With no federal funds, the whole initiative would crumble like a house of cards.
Donna Garner
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