The Governor appeared to affirm state and local BoE controls over Georgia school standards and curriculum. His May 15th executive order wording seemed a slap down of the notion that his state would offer “personally identifiable data’ on students and their families “to be collected, tracked, housed, reported or shared” with the federal government, or for any commercial enterprise.

Amidst revelations of IRS data malfeasance, the political left, right, and middle are incensed by private data collected and shared for political means. For caregivers and parents of children it is especially onerous.

According to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the data tracking system is not even in place in Georgia. Common Core standards, however, have been operational for two years, ever since the previous Governor, Sonny Perdue, accepted “The Race to the Top” federal mandates and funds for a state educational system that was both broken and broke.

“We are concerned about the future of education in the state of Georgia,” Deal said at a Capitol news conference. “Curriculum has been and will remain a local decision.”

Author of the tabled anti-Common Core bill, GA State Sen. William Ligon (R) offered the Southern hospitality, “bless your heart” response to both Governors’ actions. However Ligon urged and added,

“Common Core continues to erode student’s education, removes control of educational standards from state and local authorities and causes significant privacy concerns.
“Our students deserve better. If Georgia continues to participate in Common Core, it must accept 100 percent of the standards word-for-word and we would only be allowed to adopt 15 percent our own standards – this is only after the 100 percent Common Core requirement is fulfilled. Even with the issuing of this Executive Order, educational standards will still be set and controlled by private interests outside of the state.”

In the executive order the public is given a 60-day period for review and comments upon proposed educational state standards. CC critics may not see this as a viable means to input creative direction into their local schools. Indeed, Truth in American Education (TAE), a national, non-profit group of parents and citizen deemed the Governor’s order, “Meaningless.”

Governor Deal again declared that Common Core standards do not undermine Georgia’s curriculum decisions.Via Todd Rehm’s GAPundit.com site, is Governor Deal’s divergent stance even after signing the order:

“Common Core standards do not require information sharing with the federal government and they do not impose a federal curriculum. This executive order aims to send a clear and unambiguous message that, in Georgia, we will maintain local control over curriculum while working diligently to achieve high educational standards.”

To the jaded, perhaps IRS-audited, tea-tired activists, the royal “we” in their Governor’s executive order is troubling. They believe the Department of Education is the noun behind the pronoun, after all it holds the purse and prints the mandated reams of regulations deemed “educational standards.”

As for that sixty-day review, Georgia school districts have actively promulgated Common Core approved materials and teaching guides for several years. Only recently did one state district, Cobb County, reject the purchase of new math curriculum. Meanwhile, almost three years of Local PTO meetings on Common Core may have already lulled many into group acquiescence to a progressive fiat.

Still, there lingers Ligon’s Education Senate Bill 167 under the Atlanta State Gold Dome. After the next legislature session opens, and should state representatives of both houses pass it, it will land on Governor Deal’s desk. Will weary activists rally enough constituents to persuade Governor Nathan Deal to seal a great deal for each Georgia child?

It doesn’t matter which school each child attends–public, charter, parochial, or at a kitchen table. Federal CC standards will be in place for all, ready to be measured by national tests, tests that may not reflect what Red State parents want their kids to learn.

The day before Rep. Kingston announced his candidacy in Savannah, with this vow to WTO channel 11 reporters:

“… [W]e want to win the majority in the Senate so we can start having reforms for entitlement, reforms on spending, reforms on job creation. So that America can get moving again. I would be in the top 10 percent of the conservative members of the Senate.”

Already in the Senate Republican primary contest are Congressmen Phil Gingrey (R, GA 11) and Paul Broun (R, GA 10). Both are conservative physicians. Broun is said to be the Tea Party favorite for his daring statements concerning the evolution theorem and “Marxist-Leninist policies.” Gingery states traditional positions: trim the federal debt, overturn the President’s health care overhaul, oppose abortion rights, and fight a citizenship path for illegals.

In the wings another Congressman/M.D., Tom Price (R, GA 6) dallies on a Senate announcement. Prodding him to decide is friend, Karen Handel, of the Komen/Planned Parenthood Funding controversy. May Day 2013 Handel sent an e-mail to supporters of her former governor’s run, asking for input/prayers as she ponders the U.S. Senate seat.

As of this date there are no announcements for the Democratic spot. Possible candidates include moderate U.S. Representative John Barrow (D, GA 12), Mayor of Atlanta Kasim Reed , and executive Michelle Nunn, the daughter of the former Senator Sam Nunn (D-GA).

This Georgia race is one of eight Senatorial contests that incumbents on both sides of the aisle will not enter in the 2014 election cycle. Sen. Chambliss is a twenty-year D.C. veteran in both houses. In a surprise move, freshman Senator Mike Johanns (R) of Nebraska will retire–after a single six-year term. Senators Harkin (IA), Rockefeller (WV), Lautenberg (NJ), Levin (MI), Johnson (SD), and Baucus (MT) are the veteran Democrats that will retire from the Senate.

Incumbents, with bulging campaign chests and name recognition, are often difficult to unseat. With these retirements and other Senate contests come an opportunity for Republicans to upend the Democrat majority. But will their GOP platforms and hip music be enough to dance voters into booths that they were loathe to enter in 2008? The next year and a half will have pundits savoring noisy elections across the United States. And in one very, Red State as conservative Rep. Jack Kingston will be, as the Allman Brothers Band croon, “a ramblin’ man” to become a U.S. Senator.

Nine of Cobb high schools received medals in the U.S. News Best High Schools rankings. This spring eleven of their eighteen county high schools made the list of the Top 100 Most Challenging High Schools, based on the Challenge Index ratio of academic tests to the number of senior graduates. Cobb County sites claim educational excellence.

Why would Cobb County residents cheer this rejection of fresh educational resources?

The district’s request to the Cobb BoE offered a plethora of math enrichment for elementary, middle school, and high school students—73,000 materials including the latest online resources, teaching booklets, and hardback textbooks. The $7.5 million curricula is reported to have met the Common Core Curriculum Standards adopted by Georgia in 2010. Since 2009 the White House has used “Race to the Top” competitive grant funds to lure the fifty states to adopt Common Core national K–12 standards. According to the map, most states have fallen in line.

These standards were, incidentally, developed as a joint project of the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. Heritage Foundation analysts posited, “these common standards could one day be a qualification for states wanting future Title 1 dollars for low-income schools.”

North Georgians helped birth the original Taxed Enough Already movement. Perhaps the audience may have cheered the Cobb BoE vote as a frugal slap of reality into federal/state tax and spend addicts/enablers. Some in the audience may have seen the rejection vote as upholding local parental rights over federal mandates.

Georgia’s Republican Governor, Nathan Deal had this divergent response to the Marietta Journal:

“The federal government did not mandate it, they did not control it, they did not dictate its content… “I think there is also a misunderstanding between the Common Core standards, which simply says these are the things that a student needs to know or be able to do at certain grade levels in their school progress, as opposed to a Common Core curriculum, whereby you dictate what is taught. That is not the case here, so I think there is a lot of misunderstanding about what the Common Core does.”

For now one Georgia county will halt the buy of $7.5 million new curriculum. Yet the Peach State, as a whole, has had Common Core in place for three years. It doesn’t take forever for mandates to calcify. As a summer vacation nears, it would behoove all parents and caregivers, indeed all Georgia voters to examine the current education standards and potential curriculum.

Will these given standards and materials educate children to be informed and skilled adult citizenry of the future? It will be interesting to see who shows up at the next Board of Education meetings at Cobb or the 158 other counties of the Peach State.

It was a pleasant Saturday. As a mom who was a former member of HSLDA, I was ecstatic. And thinking double chocolate.

Earlier that third Saturday of September 2012, at 4:30 a.m., the Senate adjourned to jog the campaign trail until November’s lame duck session. Three Republican Senators joined the Democrats to move it out of committee. Congressional daily digests, however, show the Senate never called for a ratifying vote on CRPD, the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

Like Home School Legal Defense Association many parental rights groups actively engaged against ratification. They called, texted, petitioned alarming concern about potential, global sovereignty over parenting choices of special-needs children, from conception to guardian adulthood.

Some Legislators stated that, if signed, the convention would bring up the world’s standards to that of the United States. One Senator who voted the Treaty out of committee, John Isakson (R-GA), told this writer that the treaty was “non-self executing.” In the Senate declaration, he insisted, there exists language that should “create no new obligations or laws” in the United States by the UN.

“Sen. Isakson voted in favor of the Convention in the committee because ratification would signal to the world that the U.S. is committed to continuing its role as the international leader in disability rights,” Isakson’s press secretary Marie Gordon said. “It will not erode our sovereignty.”*

Senator Rick Santorum, father to a special child, begged to differ. For him ratification would give the U.N. controlling oversight over the health and educational choices parents of children with disabilities face. On his activist website Patriot Voices, Santorum wrote, “It is outrageous that the government could tell me and you what is best for our children, particularly when they’ve never met the child.”

Moreover, the Senator averred that under the U.S. Constitution’s Supremacy Clause, if the treaty were to be passed by the Senate then it would become the law of the land. The federally ratified treaty would “trump state laws.” This, in itself would rile many a states’ rights conservative.

Director of Communications and Research for ParentalRights.org, Michael Ramey, questioned Senator Isakson’s counterclaim of self non-execution.

If the treaty is to have no effect, why should we ratify it? And why should other nations of the world take our ratification seriously when it is accompanied by the understanding that we will take no action to apply it in our country? **

For the next month and a half the Senate will finally take action, not on Capitol Hill, but on pivotal, election campaign stops. For now this mom and other concerned parents and special-needs’ caregivers can take a break from D.C. faxes, cell calls, and emails on CRPD. Instead, they can scoop up ice cream.

“Put some toppings on it,” added Chancellor Farris, “Have seconds.”

Come November it will be interesting to note if parental rights groups and moms like me be re-energized or too holiday busy to act as the lame duck Congress rush a Mc-flurry of bills forward. Will the Senate add a dollop of U.N. whipped up parental control? Or will We the People prevail?

*”Undue Influence,” J.C. Derrick, posted: August. 14, 2012, 8:00 PM, World Magazine
** “CRPD Passes, Moves to Senate Floor,” Michael Ramey, July 26, 2012 AFR Front Page News

We in the Red State of mind would like to think that we actually think before we comment or pontificate, especially in public or before a camera. Still our mouths fall short of the glory of “Perfect Good” or what many evangelicals name “God” especially in the Show Me State. That is where from a field of seven candidates Rep. Todd Akin, R-Mo., became more than the presumptive GOP candidate. No matter the ads and gleeful donkey machinations, enough primary voters of Missouri anointed Todd Akin to go forward for the Senate seat. Primary voters in Utah did the same, but in greater margin they voted for GOP old guard Senator Orrin Hatch over former UT State Senator Dan Liljenquist.

Many Red State minded GOP volunteers sweated for and funded other candidates in these crucial elections to upend Reid’s control the Senate. They did not want their primary results. Principled as they are, surely they would not undermine the candidate each state has determined to represent them-especially when these candidates’ voting records are in more in line with the GOP 2012 platform draft than their presumptive presidential nominee is.

Just before the Tampa Convention Akin’s incredulous out-of-context comment on abortion and rape stirred up a political storm that, by coincidence, got the President to speak at a White House press conference. The glitterati of National Republicans spoke up too, demanding Akin to step away from the ballot.

As of this writing only evangelicals like the Family Research Council, support Rep. Todd Akin’s decision to stay on the Missouri ballot. Evangelicals, the candidate claims, are the ones who voted him onto that ballot. Congressman Akin represents the St. Louis County, a county in which resides two seminaries, one of the PCA, the Presbyterian Church of America and the other, LCMS, the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod—both profoundly conservative, and pro-life. So they stand.

By the evangelical sola gratia creed how could FRC not support an apologetic human who is profoundly conservative and pro-life with no exemptions? Even after a man against their social stands tried to gun them down?

Or is this extrapolating beyond the faux constitutional barrier of state and church matters? Perhaps the impending Isaac will wash away the angry maelstrom Akin stirred around The Scarlet Letter of the GOP: Abortion. This issue, however, must be addressed as the opposing party has brazenly done so on a host of social issues. Did the conservative leaning draft of the Republican Platform stand or tilt left with moderate erasures? Did the platform get read and heeded by their candidates?

Update:Sadly, House Speaker John Boener’s reply made full spectrum conservatives cringe:

“Well, I have not seen the platform, but from every indication that I’ve heard I don’t see any major changes in this platform from what we have had in the past. And if it were up to me I would have the platform on one sheet of paper. Have you ever met anybody who read the party platform? I’ve not met ever anybody.”

A few months before, on May 31st, Americans United With Israel started a Facebook account that would organize this peaceful rally. According to their new webpage, the afternoon event was not “a religious expression, but an American expression for those supporting Israel… to support the Israeli Government’s call for peace.”  The organizers were both Hassidic and Christian. The crowd, in the thousands, was equally diverse, Gentile and Jewish and multi-racial.

The Atlanta Jewish Times ad for the event touted Consul General Ophir Aviram and conservative Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) as speakers. But a surprise guest speaker was the liberal Congressman John Lewis (D-GA). Without notes and in black pulpit cadences Rep. Lewis affirmed that, “America is Israel’s ally.”

The concerns of the crowd focused on the impending September 22nd UN vote on the Palestinian proposal to seek “Unilateral Declaration of Independence.” If this proposal were put forward before the UN Security council, one veto from the five permanent members- China, France, Russia, Britain, and the U.S.—would end the declaration. There are indications three of those nations would veto.

However the plan is to circumvent the council and present the UDI, Unilateral Declaration of Independence, directly to the 192 member countries of the General Assembly. If passed there, the UDI would be a non-binding recommendation. The word “unilateral” cuts against the desires of those supporting Israel and the history of the region.

The United Nations in 1947 voted for a two state solution, which the Jews accepted and declared the following year the Israeli State. However Arabs rejected that state and attacked. A 1949 armistice defined the lines between them, now referred to as the “1967 borders.”

The decades since that decision have not led the Arab nations in control of the Gaza and West bank areas to flourish into a productive Arab nation state. Despite the current discontent by encamped Tahrir Square youth, developed Israel has only a mild economic malaise and recently approved more housing developments. These settlements will be in an area that the Palestinian Authority will ask the full UN to bestow unilaterally as part of their independent state.

The diverse crowd assembled Sunday in Atlanta, Georgia would beg to differ, affirming a two-sided negotiation refining the two-state solution of 1949. With attendees of all races holding hands to sing, “Hine Ma Tov,” the Hebrew song for Unity, the crowd expressed hope for negotiated Middle East unity over UN voted unilateralism.

In a month the AUWI rally attendees will know whether the UN rejects or reflects such a position.

In the Atlanta Georgia School District, hours after the students handed in these tests, an alleged 140 teachers feverishly erased wrong answers and penciled in correct answers. An alleged thirty-eight principals were equally busy. Later, superintendants above them tried to muzzle the whistleblowers and rewarded the erasure users with rewards for improved effort.

In the decade leading into 2009 the Atlanta Public Schools students’ scores rose so dramatically that its Superintendent Beverly Hall was named the  “2009 Superintendent of the Year.” By June of 2009 Hall stepped down from her post, days before the release of a report documenting the systemic efforts by teachers and school administrators to boost student results.

It was the dramatic rise in test scores followed a precipitous drop of scores the following year that prompted Georgia to pursue a legal investigation of the CRCT results. The PDF summary of the reported CRCT investigation worded the raw result: “Thousands of children were harmed by the 2009 CRCT cheating by being denied remedial education because of their inflated CRCT scores.”

CRCT was said to be the benchmark of the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Parents and educators claimed that the tasks demanded by such federal mandates forced teachers to teach to these tests. To limit education hours to the input of test answers, some say inhibits greater educational experiences for gifted students.

But can we say that mandates alone forced many educators to focus on the testing and some to manipulate false results? Many too quickly, too easily point fingers at others.  However, Providence pricks the individual conscience. For a society’s beneficial functioning the children–with the best of their abilities–should be nurtured by adults to read, to calculate, to communicate, to socially engage, and to reason.

We who are parents must give pause and consider our roles in this nurturing or education.

By DNA or adoption or fostering, we are to parent the children with us. Shouldn’t our lives with them fix in us an inner gauge of our children’s schooling? If we daily engage with our children’s lives–read with them, interact with them, oversee homework alongside of them–can we not glean whether or not our children need remedial intervention?

Finally, how will parents now engage with the educators and the system we leave our children with? It would behoove parents to spend less on the extracurricular frills suburbanites crave. It is time to refocus family time, PTA meetings, school board meetings, and get back to the basics.

We knew who Scott Brown was not.He was not Ted Kennedy. Moreover, we knew too much about who Scott Brown is. We had Mr. Brown’s raw biography chronicled from birth to military to magazine to state legislature. A former JAG, Scott Brown supported the troop surge as a necessary component to achieve victory. That gave his candidacy a too hasty patriotic salute.

Senator Brown’s stands, however, on social issues were and are clearly moderate. Though he would not reject The Defense of Marriage Act, Scott Brown avowed the issue of same sex relationships in his state was “settled.” Despite his stand against partial birth abortion and his stand for parental consent, for Scott Brown the case of Roe vs. Wade was the “law of the land,” a law social conservatives deem unconscionable as it undermines the constitutional protection of life.

As for his fiscal positions, Brown seemed circumspect, as his campaign claimed he would not push for taxes in “a severe recession.” In a September 2009 radio interview Candidate Brown, reflected on the year anniversary of the financial meltdown.

It’s all about the economy and jobs. Pulling back on the financial [regulations], I think if you do too much too soon, it doesn’t have a chance to catch up and see if we can work out of this ourselves through free enterprise, through private enterprise, intervention and creativity. So I’m all in favor of just holding back for a little bit and letting private enterprise try to get us out of this mess.

So Thursday “a little bit” of time was up. Senator Brown cast a deciding vote. Does it matter whether the Senator along with two other Republican Party Senators read the 2,315 pages of that bill? Few in Congress know the details. The President will sign this bill with its 350,000 worded regulations. In this vote Senator Brown averred his moderate, big government stance.

Though I couldn’t vote for him, nor did I fund his campaign, I confess. I blindly rooted for his victory. I did not wear my pince-nez of principles nor my Franklin founding spectacles. I could have read the fine print news articles and determined that Brown was and is Brown.

In this election year we need to be as wise and as well-read as Jesus Christ and Abe Lincoln. I pray we don’t become repeat offenders in future political campaigns.

The number of people filing new claims for unemployment benefits unexpectedly rose last week by the largest amount in three months. The big surge was a setback to hopes that layoffs were declining.

The Labor Department says that applications for unemployment benefits rose to 471,000 last week, up by 25,000 from the previous week. It was the first increase in five weeks and the biggest jump since a gain
 of 40,000 in February.

The visual charts exposed the ill health of American young adults, fact over bulging fact:

• 1996 -1998  One state alone recorded over 40 % of 18-24 year olds obese.
• 2006-2008,  Thirty-nine states recorded 40% or more 18-24 year olds were obese.
• 1995-2008 140,000 young adult recruits were deemed too heavy for the military.

Granted a few states did not have sufficient data to be rated, but still do citizens want our Congress to heed, for the sake of “National Security,” this military request?

Historically U.S. military leaders have always been concerned about healthy recruits.

“During World War II, military leaders had the opposite problem,reporting that many recruits were rejected because of stunted growth and inadequate nutrition. After the war, military leaders pushed Congress to establish the national school lunch program so children would grow up healthier.”

Can we say the progressive answer, a statist, programmed edict  birthed and ballooned our current security threat? Or have we, instead, yielded individual responsibility to nanny control?  Have  we again let the state correct what we as parents have failed to model, manage, and make (homemade lunches,etc.)?

Caring parents know the individual needs of their kids. How often we hear from a parent, “God made the mold and broke the mold” for each birthed child. The genetic code is so intricate, beautifully diverse. We know that slimming food for one relative is bulking, bulging food for another. And there are those pesky allergic reactions to healthy foods grown in the best of organic gardens–like tomatoes for the fructose intolerant or Vitamin E, protein packing peanuts for others.

We can agree with the military leaders, that growing healthier kids secures a prepared nation. But will we again hand progressives the means to narrow and nationalize diets for divergent families?

Maybe we need to reboot responsibly–starting this week. Limit the couch time with a digital screen any size and get moving. Exercise, and, for those with kids at home, go pack some delicious, catered to their health needs, homemade lunch.