Why the Bond Failed

In his article on How to Get the Next Bond Approved, Scott Chaney of The Lake Spokane Times made some suggestions:

Be More Straightforward, saying that the gym was on the bond because the community asked for it.  What Mr Chaney doesn’t understand is the new definition of community under education transformation.  Community is defined as those who vocally support or tacitly support (do not vocally oppose) what the school district wants.  It is easy to see why the community wanted the gym on the bond under that definition.  When you only ask the questions of the “yes” men, the answer will be “yes” whether the reality is “yes” or not.

Be More Mature, saying that people who voted against the bond were labeled anti-education.  That’s only part of the story, however.  When education transformation (aka, education reform, outcome-based education, performance-based education) came to the Nine Mile Falls School District back in 1992 with the hiring of Dr Shirley Holloway as the new superintendent, parents soon learned they were being lied to about what education transformation was. 

What they did not know was that education transformation was coming from the federal level through grants, and was supported by the powerful National Education Association (NEA) and its state affiliates such as the Washington Education Associate (WEA).  In books like No Right Turn; If You Don’t, They Will; and What’s Left After the Right, the NEA labeled everyone and anyone who asked questions or opposed the humanist [1] education transformation as a “right wing (Christian) religious fanatic” out to destroy the system of education the NEA supported.  Since the NEA is the national teacher’s union, the majority of teachers obviously took up the cause set forth in those books.

And the three books mentioned above set down in explicit detail how to counter the concerns and questions of those they deemed anti-education.  Those tactics were used in the Nine Mile Falls School District, not to answer the hard questions asked, but to label anyone asking those questions and demanding answers as anti-education.  Even school board members were involved in spreading rumors around through the Nine Mile community about those asking the hard questions that the school board nor school district wanted asked and certainly did not want to answer.  The intent of those rumors was to inflame and incite people against those asking the hard questions.  The tactic was successful; the harassment of those vocally opposed began and continued aided and abetted by the refusal of the Stevens County Sheriff’s Office to insure the First Amendment rights of those speaking out. [2] The children of school board members were involved in that harassment.

And while people may think the vandalism, harassment, and terrorizing of people in the community is hilarious, somehow justified, or whatever, they also get the message loud and clear, “If you don’t like what your tax dollars are paying for, go home, shut up, and go along if you don’t want the same.”

So when the mil rates begin to affect people’s pocketbooks and their ability to exist on their salaries, they won’t say anything, they certainly won’t voice their opposition, they won’t show up at school board meetings or public forums put on by the school district, they will simply vote “no”.  The people opposed to education transformation may have gone away but the rancor they felt at having no voice did not.  Add to that the growing discontent over the lack of education in the classrooms.  In setting out to get rid of those voicing concerns and opposition to education transformation, the school district basically cut off its nose to spite its face. [3]  The backlash was inevitable.

All one need do, to see the effect of education transformation on the kids in the Nine Mile Falls School District, is to look at the number of times every month that the Sheriff’s Office is called to the different schools concerning assault, harassment, bomb and other threats, guns, knives, and other such devices on school grounds that can be used as weapons against another; the high school has even experienced a suicide, with a gun, in the building. 

Barry Loukatis, who became the notorious killer at Frontier Junior High in Moses Lake in 1996, had been subjected to education transformation since 1988 under the Schools for the 21st Century Program, the pilot for education transformation in Washington state and nation-wide.

Why wasn’t this happening before the advent of education transformation?  The answer lies in what the kids are being taught under education transformation.  If you want a child to grow up to be a productive citizen in a free society, you don’t teach that child that …

8      his morals, standards, and values are whatever he wants them to be at any particular time;

8      his parents and grandparents just don’t understand him; are old fashioned and stifling;

8      his parents are the source of all his problems;

8      immoral conduct doesn’t exist;

8      the rights of the community must supercede the rights of the individual;

8      scorched earth theory;

8      Mother Earth will parish if they don’t change their ways.

Nor do you place the problems of the world on a child’s shoulders and expect children, with their lack of experience and knowledge, with their lack of years of living, to solve them.

Nor is a child a flower to be allowed to simply grow up as is believed by the followers of humanist and socialist, John Dewey, the father of education transformation whose theories [4] were built upon by the likes of Benjamin Bloom, John Goodlad, Ralph Tyler, Howard Gardner, Abraham Maslow, William Glasser, Carl Rogers and a host of others of like humanist mind and disposition.

It is the schools, seeped in and teaching the religions of humanism and New Age, that is the cause of the problems. [5]

The school district doesn’t need more money, what the school district needs is to quit wasting the taxpayers’ money on a failed system of education, based on a Dark Ages world view, that brings nothing but misery.

Education isn’t about money, isn’t about aesthetic buildings, isn’t about having the most and the best, education is about dedication to teaching a child how to use his mind such that he can access and utilize a vast continuum of factual knowledge in pursuit of a reasoned conclusion.  Education transformation is not about educating children, it is about behavior modification to meet the humanist agenda of a “sustainable global environment” — creating the future [6] as “no deity will save us, we must save ourselves.” [7]

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[1] Humanism, like Christianity, New Age, Buddhism, Islam … is a religion; a world view; how one views the world and the purpose of it.

[2] Many letters now published in The Lake Spokane News Forum, critical of the school district or its policies, are not signed because the people fear reprisal.

[3] So much for “tolerating others views” and “diversity”, both of which mean that you are tolerated so long as you come to their way of thinking.

[4] A theory is not fact.  Dewey’s theories were based on the Humanist world view.

[5] Prayer (Christian world view) was banned in schools in 1963.  Schools are supposed to be non-sectarian (an oxymoron as education, in every instance, is based on a religious world view).  So why are the religions of humanism and New Age being allowed to be taught in the schools?

[6] This is a term used throughout education transformation; also in the Nine Mile Falls School District.

[7] Humanist Manifesto II; 1973