THE CHURCH MILITANT
Ephesians 5:11-"And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them". This Christian News Blog maintains a one stop resource of current news and reports of its own related to church, moral, spiritual, and related political issues, plus articles, and postings from other online discernment ministries, and media which share the aims to obey the biblical commands to shed light on and refute error, heresy, apostasy, cults, and spiritual abuse.
"The PepperBall TAC-700 pepper spray launcher “features full auto, semi-auto, or 3 round burst providing up to 700 rounds per minute,”according to the company which will provide the DHS with the weapons. It is also “accurate to 60 feet with area saturation up to 150 feet.” The weapon is routinely used in riot control situations around the world."
"The “riot expansion kits” being purchased by the DHS are holsters that accompany the PepperBall products and can be used to store projectiles. According to one website, they represent, “the perfect non-lethal crowd management tool for gaining compliance over rioters, organized protesters, and unlawful assemblies,” and can be used to, “Gain psychological advantage over unruly crowds.”"
Dr. Karen Effrem is a pediatrician, researcher, and conference speaker. Dr. Effrem's medical degree is from Johns Hopkins University and her pediatric training from the University of Minnesota. She has provided testimony for Congress, as well as in-depth analysis of numerous pieces of major federal education, health, and early childhood legislation for congressional staff, state legislatures, and many organizations. Dr. Effrem serves on the boards of two national organizations: Education Liberty Watch and the Alliance for Human Research Protection. She is a member of The International Society for Ethical Psychiatry and Psychology. She has spoken at numerous state and national conferences. She has been interviewed by Fox News and interviewed by or quoted in the Wall Street Journal, the British Medical Journal, National Journal, WorldNetDaily, NewsMax, Shark Tank, newspapers, radio and television stations across the country. Dr. Karen Effrem and her husband Paul, have three children.
"Under Common Core, Effrem said, students’ personal information increasingly is being collected, measured and assessed while the standards shift the focus away from academics and toward psychological training and testing of personal attitudes and behaviors."
"Effrem said many Common Core standards and assessments will be used to collect data that go beyond academics to focus on student’s psychological attitudes, values and beliefs."
Reprinted below in full unedited for informational, educational, and research purposes:
Karen R. Effrem, MD
President – Education Liberty Watch
The type and amount of personal, family, and non-academic data collected by the schools, reported in state longitudinal databases and used for research by the federal government was stimulated by the passage of the Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002 (ESRA) and has grown rapidly since then.Loss of student and family data privacy has been accelerated by the proliferation of education programs funded by the federal government, especially in the early childhood realm and including home visiting programs that collect a plethora of medical, psychological, and family data and the effort to integrate standards, programs and data literally from “cradle to career” through P-20W education program integration and state longitudinal databases that were part of the Head Start reauthorization of 2007 and required by the Race to the Top and Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge grant programs starting in 2009.
ESRA is up for reauthorization. That law allows the National Center for Education Statistics to collect data “by other offices within the Academy and by other Federal departments, agencies and instrumentalities.” and “enter into interagency agreements for the collection of statistics.”That data covers from preschool through the work life of every American citizen and includes “the social and economic status of children, including their academic achievement,” meaning every aspect of their lives and the lives of their families.This combined with the weakening of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) to be described below is a great danger to the privacy of American families and makes the data collection by the IRS and NSA look tame.
In addition, although ESRA makes an effort to prohibit a national database of individually identifiable student data in section 182 by saying, “Nothing in this title may be construed to authorize the establishment of a nationwide database of individually identifiable information on individuals involved in studies or other collections of data under this title;” that language appears to be negated by this language in Section 157:
“The Statistics Center may establish 1 or more national cooperative education statistics systems for the purpose of producing and maintaining, with the cooperation of the States, comparable and uniform information and data on early childhood education, elementary and secondary education, postsecondary education, adult education, and libraries, that are useful for policymaking at the Federal, State, and local levels.” (Emphasis added).
That language is even more worrisome in light of the grants to fund and promote state longitudinal databases in section 208 of ESRA, in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and even more heavily promoted in the Race to the Top K-12 and Early Learning Challenge programs.
Both Head Start and Race to the Top heavily promoted national standards and the integration of those standards across the age spectrum.Both programs also heavily rely on standards and assessment and or screening in the mental health (psychological and socioemotional) realm
·According to the United States Department of Education (USED) document entitledPromoting Grit, Tenacity, and Perseverance: Critical Factors for Success in the 21st Century, the Common Core standards system will both teach and assess these “non-cognitive” (psychological) parameters:
o“In national policy, there is increasing attention on 21st-century competencies (which encompass a range of noncognitive factors, including grit), and persistence is now part of the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics.”
o[A]s new assessment systems are developed to reflect the new standards…attention will need to be given to the design of tasks and situations that call on students to apply a range of 21st century competencies…A sustained program of research and development will be required to create assessments that are capable of measuring cognitive, intrapersonal, and interpersonal skills.
·According to the Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge grant applications, several states are aligning their preschool standards and their K-12 standards, these standards teach psychologicalissues, which are then used for “screening” young children for mental health issues, even though the screening instruments are notoriously inaccurate. Here are some examples of the types of the very subjective and non-academic standards used:
o“Progresses in responding sympathetically to peers who are in need, upset, hurt, or angry, and in expressing empathy or caring for others.”
o“Develops ability to identify personal characteristics including gender and family composition”
o“Develops a growing awareness of jobs and what is required to perform them.”
The testing of psychological parameters in the national assessments is especially disturbing when it is understood that the national testing consortia signed an agreement with USED to submit individually identifiable student data to the federal government from the tests:
“Comply with and where applicable coordinate with the ED staff to fulfill the program requirements established in the RTTA Notice Inviting Applications and the conditions on the grant award, as well as to this agreement, including, but not limited to working with the Department to develop a strategy to make student – level data that results from the assessment system available on an ongoing basis for research, including for prospective linking, validity, and program improvement studies; subject to applicable privacy laws.” (Emphasis added)
The federal student privacy law, The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) has been so weakened in an effort to make sensitive student and family data from state longitudinal data systems that collectsdata from the Common Core assessments, including the psychological data cited above, available for research without consent to various agencies of the federal government, corporations and outside researchers, that the Electronic Privacy Information Center has sued USED in federal court, that case being heard on July 24, 2013.
·That lawsuit occurred in great part due to the major expansion of the longstanding definition of an authorized representative in the regulations that now allows other state and federal agencies to have access to individually identifiable student data.
·The list of entities with that access includes, “A contractor, consultant, volunteer, or other party to whom an agency or institution has outsourced institutional services or functions may be considered a school official”(Emphasis added)
With the understanding that federal involvement in education is unconstitutional, ineffective, harmful, and expensive, we make the following recommendations to deal with the situation as it currently exists:
1)The federal promotion of the teaching through standards, testing through federally funded and supervised national tests, and data collection of psychological parameters on children from preschool onward must cease and be prohibited immediately
2)The psychological screening of children in federal programs should also cease, especially for the preschool age group.At a minimum, there should be written, informed, opt-in parental consent similar to the language of the Parental Consent Act
3)Before ESRA is reauthorized, FERPA must be re-strengthened to truly protect student privacy which will hopefully be aided with the ruling in the ongoing federal lawsuit.
4)The amount and extent of data collected on innocent American children and their families in the name of education is a clear and serious violation of the Fourth Amendmentand must also be curtailed if and as ESRA is reauthorized
5)All funding for Race to the Top in any form or any other grant program that promotes national standards, tests, and data collection should cease.
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The Psychological Weapon Known as the Delphi Technique:
What is the Delphi Technique? This is an introduction to what was developed by the RAND Corporation for the U.S. Department of Defense back in the 1950s. It was originally intended for use as a psychological weapon during the cold war and is now used in town meetings, churches, and many "public" gatherings.
EXCERPT: "Those like Gov. Cuomo who cling to the tyrannical ideology of the Left have no foundation based in truth, freedom or a love for America's founding, so they lie and distort the truth of conservatism."
If You Embrace Murder & Immorality,
Move To New York, i.e., Sodom & Gomorrah:
Published on Jan 21, 2014
NY Governor Cuomo states that morality has NO place in the State of New York. Pro-lifers & traditional marriage advocates.... Stay out! 2nd amendment adherents... not welcome!
Cuomo "Conservatives Not Welcome in NY State":
NY Gov Andrew Cuomo Extreme Conservatives Have
No Place In State New York:
Published on Jan 20, 2014
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo believes that pro-life activists along with anti-gay activists, and supporters of the Second Amendment, are not welcome in his state. During a radio interview on Friday, Cuomo pointed out that Republicans were in the midst of a schism, where conservatives worked against moderate Republicans. "Their problem is not me and the Democrats; their problem is themselves," he said. "Who are they? Are they these extreme conservatives who are right-to-life, pro-assault-weapon, anti-gay? Is that who they are? Because if that's who they are and they're the extreme conservatives, they have no place in the state of New York, because that's not who New Yorkers are." State Republicans blasted his comments, the New York Post reported, even as the governor walked them back on Sunday in an open letter to the newspaper.
Governor Andrew Cuomo is Bull Conner:
Andrew Cuomo says Cardinal Dolan Catholics
should leave New York:
Published on Jan 19, 2014
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has made it quite clear that if you do not agree with this far left way of thinking, he will try to make sure that you are not welcomed in the state of New York.
Yvonne Gasperino, mother of two children and founder of StopCommonCoreinNewYork.com, explains how Common Core came to New York.--West Harrison, New York. September 21, 2013.
Common Core makes children Human Capital:
Published on Oct 6, 2013
Yvonne Gasperino, founder of Stop Common Core in New York, warns the people that Common Core transforms our children's education into a top down one-size-fits-all system of control that designates children as human capital.--Albany, New York. October 5, 2013.
The American Principles Project (APP), the Heartland Institute and Pioneer Institute, co-hosted a one-day conference at Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, in September 2013, to discuss the destructive implications of the Common Core Standards and the future of the education of America's youth. More than 200 people were in attendance at the sold out conference. Among the states represented were California, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, and West Virginia; most of which have strong grassroots movements fighting against the Common Core. Leading experts addressed the conference on the changing landscape of the American education system and the implications of the Common Core Standards. Concerned citizens, many of whom are parents, joined in the discussion by sharing their experiences and concerns. For more information, visit: http://americanprinciplesproject.org/...
Heather Crossin at Civitas Common Core Forum:
Published on Oct 10, 2013
On September 19th, 2013 Civitas and the Heritage Foundation hosted the Common Core Forum in Raleigh. The event called together a variety of top-notch speakers including Jim DeMint President of the Heritage Foundation, Lieutenant Governor Dan Forest, Dr. Sandra Stotsky formerly of the University of Arkansas and others.
Heather Crossin Interview at Civitas Common Core Event:
Published on Oct 14, 2013
Heather Crossin Interview at Civitas Common Core Event
Jim DeMint Interview at Civitas Common Core Forum:
Jane Robbins
South Dakota Common Core Conference;
THE PROPAGANDA BEHIND THE COMMON CORE
YOU'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO KNOW THE TRUTH
Published on Aug 25, 2013
Jane Robbins speaking at the South Dakota Common Core Conference in Rapid City, South Dakota, Aug. 24, 2013. Jane Robbins is a native of Pendleton, South Carolina, and is a graduate of Harvard Law School and Clemson University. Ms. Robbins began her career as a labor lawyer for an Atlanta firm, after which she worked for the firm as director of associate training and writing coach. Since then she has taught legal writing at Emory Law School, presented legal-writing workshops for firms in Atlanta and Washington, DC, and served as a writing consultant for several Atlanta firms. In the past several years she has handled a variety of legal projects for different firms and organizations. Ms. Robbins is a Senior Fellow at the American Principles Project which was founded to reinvigorate and restore those principles that made our country great.. On behalf of APP, Jane Robbins work includes education policy, student privacy and parental rights issues. Ms. Robbins has drafted state legislation on educational transparency and sovereignty that has led to a parallel resolution by the South Carolina Southern Baptist Convention, model ALEC legislation, and emulated legislation in several states. Her writings have appeared in, among other places, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The New York Post, and Public Discourse. *Jane Robbins also appears in this Common Core video series that is highly recommended, put out by the American Principles Project and Concerned Women of Georgia.) http://whatiscommoncore.wordpress.com... http://truthinamericaneducation.com/t...
LEVITTOWN, NEW YORK MEETING
ABOUT COMMON CORE:
Published on Oct 23, 2013
Listen to the guest speaker, Dr. Rella, superintendent of Comsewogue School District. He is in strong and publicly vocal opposition to the Common Core State Standards Initiative.
