All Minnesota Senate seats are up for re-election in 2006. 2006 is the year to hold the majority Minnesota Senators accountable for their 2004 votes to oppose the citizen social studies standards in Minnesota. The Senate majority rejected the citizen standards, and adopted instead a radical alternative written by University of Minnesota professors. Here is a description of that process from the perspective of two of the authors of the radical standards adopted by the Minnesota Senate

The "national history standards" referred to above are the anti-American national standards that the U.S. Senate opposed in 1995 on a vote of 99 to 1. This gives a clue about the nature of the University professors' reference point. In their alternative standards, the University crowd attempted to censor out any legitimate reference to the genuine historical influence of Christianity, dismissing the work of parents and taxpayers of Minnesota as "radically right wing" and "a fundamentalist Christian version." Still, the radicals lost significant ground in the final conference compromise, which gave us partial success.

Every one of the majority party Senators voted against including the principles of national sovereignty and self-evident truth in the Senate version of the standards. (See our update of May 11, 2004.) They each also voted against restoring the historical eras of BC (Before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini - year of our Lord) to the standards. The University crowd had removed any reference such as these to America's Christian heritage by replacing those acronyms with BCE (Before Common Era) and CE (Common Era).

The Minnesota Senators believe that by 2006, voters will forget their 2004 votes. EdWatch has documented the votes, and we will remember.

All Minnesota House seats are up for re-election in 2006, as are the Governor and all Constitutional offices. All U.S. House seats are up in 2006.

We urge good candidates to consider running for legislative office. If you know good potential candidates, urge them to consider running and help them get started. The education cartel can only discuss money for schools. We talk about what students are taught, what they're learning, how they're taught, and whether schools will teach knowledge-based education instead of trying to transform our children into global citizens. Candidates for the legislature and Congress need to run on those issues.
 

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According to an article in last week's USA Today, Armstrong Williams, a nationally syndicated radio, print and television personality, was paid $240,000 by the Education Department to promote the No Child Left Behind Act.

The contract required Williams' company, the Graham Williams Group, to produce radio and TV ads that promote the controversial law and feature one-minute ``reads'' by Paige. The deal also allowed Paige and other department officials to appear as studio guests with Williams. Williams, one of the leading black conservative voices in the country, was also to use his influence with other black journalists to get them to talk about No Child Left Behind.

The department's contract with Williams dates to 2003 and 2004. It is billed as a ``minority outreach campaign." The Department promotes No Child Left Behind with a video that comes across as a news story but fails to make clear the reporter involved was paid with taxpayer money. It has also has paid for rankings of newspaper coverage of the law, with points awarded for stories that say Bush and the Republican Party are strong on education. The Government Accountability Office, Congress' auditing arm, is investigating those spending decisions. The Education Department says its decision is a "permissible use of taxpayer funds under legal government contracting procedures."