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March 22, 2005

1.  Alert: Support cuts to the Federal Curriculum, Mental Health Screening, and STW
2.  Alert: Oppose the Expansion of NCLB to High Schools

Congress in Spring Recess until April 4th. This is a great time to ask for a meeting with your Senators and Representative..
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1. Alert: Support cuts to the Federal Curriculum, Mental Health Screening, and STW
The President has proposed significant cuts to the Federal Curriculum, Mental Health Screening in the schools, and School-to-Work. Those proposals will not survive the Congressional budget process without the involvement of thousands of parents and taxpayers. The well-funded special interests are lining up to defend these programs. Please take advantage of this important opportunity to eliminate some very bad programs in the U.S. Department of Education.

EdAction urges you to alert your networks to contact your U.S. senators and representative to tell them to:

Support a budget resolution that includes elimination of all of programs included in the President's proposed 2006 Department of Education budget request.

For a sample letter, click here. Please forward us a copy of your letter at edaction@lakes.com.

The following programs are particularly important to eliminate:
The Federal Curriculum:

• Civic Education. ($29.4 million) Funds the Center for Civic Education (CCE) to publish, promote, and distribute We the People: The Citizen and the Constitution, a radical curriculum that undermines our founding principles, such as national sovereignty, and moves students toward global citizenship. This program also trains teachers, lawmakers and judges, and sets up student programs. ( See FedEd: The New Federal Curriculum and How It's Enforced ) For example, the CCE will conduct an Institute for State Supreme Court Justices in April, 2005. The CCE is a resource for the UN's Decade on Education for Sustainable Development in their efforts to integrate their social activism for sustainable development throughout the curriculum of schools around the world. (See UNESCO's " ;Citizenship Education").
• Excellence in Economic Education ($1.5 million) Funds a single non-governmental organization to publish, promote, and distribute specific economics standards.

Mental Health

• Mental Health Integration in Schools ($5.0 million) Links school systems with the mental health system. "to enhance, improve, or develop collaborative efforts between school-based service systems and mental health service systems to provide, enhance, or improve prevention, diagnosis, and treatment services to students."  This is 5 million more dollars for screening, labeling and drugging students.  (See our update.)
• Foundations for Learning ($1.0 million) Provides federal grants to states and other agencies for preschool screenings, parent education, social services, home visits, transportation and curriculum to support "social and emotional development," all based on vary vague criteria like being "at risk" of being removed from child care or "exposed to parental mental illness."  Subsidizes the labeling and drugging of an alarmingly large population of young children with potent medications that have not been studied in that age group. (See our update .)

School-to-Work

• Smaller Learning Communities ($94.5 million) "The question before us is whether...we accept bureaucrats choosing careers for our children and directing our economy, or whether liberty will remain our children's future. (See article in Education Reporter)
• Vocational Education National Programs ($11.8 million) Institutes research, assessment, evaluation, dissemination, and technical assistance for the School-to-Work system that links centralized workforce planning with job training in the schools. (See our update.)
• Vocational Education State Grants ( $1,194.3 million) More money to direct states into the workforce planning system. (See Marc Tucker's letter to Hillary Clinton, 1992.)
• Tech-Prep Education State Grants ( $105.8 million) Transforms schools away from academic learning and into job training programs. (See " School-to-Work is Alive and Well.")
• Present STW programs are incorporated into the federal Workforce Investment system that requires states to put appointed government planning agencies in charge of business development. Schools become the "supplier" of a planned economy, and students are slotted early to planned worker needs. STW is not the voc-ed of a generation ago. All students, in today's STW system, must be on career paths at least by 7th or 8th grades, and academics is relegated only to what's useful for the students' planned career. Parents have rebelled over their children's futures being determined by 12 and 13 years old.

Other program

• Regional Educational Laboratories ($66.1 million) These Labs have been the planning centers for Transformation Education since they began four decades ago.
• Comprehensive School Reform ($205.3 million) This program funds numerous efforts to transform schools from knowledge-based learning to social services centers, School-to-Work, Early Childhood centers, and transformational learning.

A sample letter to members of Congress is available on our website. Personalize your letter to your senators and representative and send it via email. For more impact, print it out and fax it to their offices! Fax numbers may be found here,
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2.  Alert: Oppose the Expansion of NCLB to High Schools
The proposal to expand No Child Left Behind to high schools expands federal authority ever farther over education. The National Governor's Association is fully behind this expansion, having launched Goals 2000 and School-to-Work in 1989. The columnist George Will wrote:

"When, a couple of weeks ago, the RSC [a group of conservative Republicans in Congress] met in Baltimore to enumerate its priorities, their list included "maintaining local control of secondary education." That may seem an anodyne sentiment; actually it is a shot across the Bush administration's bow. It is code for: Enough centralization -- we oppose the president's plan for extending federal standards to high schools. Thirty-four House Republicans voted against No Child Left Behind in 2001. More might oppose the administration's planned extension of its sweep." [Emphasis added.]

Please urge your members to strongly oppose NCLB into high schools. Your calls make a powerful difference.

For a clear explanation of NCLB, read AMERICA'S SCHOOLS: The Battleground for Freedom, by Professor Allen Quist. The author explains how international agreements form the basis of No Child Left Behind. He also describes how the state standards and assessments are promoting pantheism, multi-culturalism and the New Marxism. Most important, he describes where we go from here.

Contact information for Alerts to Congress:
To find your members of Congress and e-mail and telephone contact information, visit this website and click on your own state. For a sample letter, click here. Both the House and the Senate have passed their budget resolutions. The specific programs that will be included in these guidelines will be determined in the coming weeks and months. It is very important that the public weighs in on some very important budget issues. Please forward us a copy of your letter at edaction@lakes.com.  Thank you!

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