STOP Being Deceived – HB 1605 OER + School Choice = Government Regulated Control
By Alice Linahan 08/29/2024
Those pushing Texas Commissioner of Education Mike Morath’s $2.44 Billion (YES BILLION) dollar curriculum management system which uses Open Education Resource technology (whether they know it or not) are putting all students (our children) in harms way.
Do the Pastors mentioned below know the history of how Open Education Resources come into Texas Schools and that the Global Common Core Standards are being fully implemented in Texas?
Did you?
This week the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) hosted a Pastors, Parishioners, Parent Empowerment Summit. Watching the Pastors calling on their flock to lobby for government regulated school choice was disheartening. And then to go on and join forces with so called Christian Conservative elected officials and TPPF to lobby the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) to approve the current rendition of the Texas Open Education Resources (OER) curriculum funded through a bill passed in the last session (HB 1605). The fact is, what they are pushing is an online digital curriculum aligned to the global Common Core/College and Career Readiness standards. The deception is rampant and the cost to our children will be great.
If you have received a text or an email asking you to contact the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) in regard to HB1605, please do NOT support it. I have never seen the Republican party and faith leaders be so UNITED on one issue. The greatest deception is the panic they have created to get people to take action. The groups that are sending out this call to action have obviously not read the bill and do not understand the history behind how OER came into Texas. They have been deceived.
Tech giants like Google and Amazon play a key roll in OER. The CCSSO and New America are ecstatic at how quickly schools and states are adopting OER. OER is a term coined by the United Nations education division, UNESCO. OER is referenced in HB1605 bill over 60 times? As mentioned by TEA Kristen Hole, Associate Commissioner of Instructional Strategies during her testimony, the Texas product had to meet Open Education Resource requirements”
Now does that sound like a Classical American education curriculum to you? Well, it is being sold to those Christians on the right side of the aisle as a Texas made Classical curriculum with Bible and patriotic history stories. Commissioner Morath says it is High Quality Instructional Materials (HQIM) that are owned by the TEA and use phonics, and are developed so they can be taught with pen and paper, not online digital learning.
Well as we say here in the south…
Conservatives that are sounding the alarm about tech giants controlling online content need to understand how this exact same thing is happening with online “personalized” curriculum for every student. There needs to be reporting on THIS dark side of the Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Twitter, US Dept. of Ed, UNESCO story: OER can be rated, curated and tracked in order to control the curriculum and assessments that teachers and children use. OER, using Common Education Data Standards, ties teacher/student learning to global Competency-Based Curriculum giving them access to assess, benchmark and modify students values, beliefs, behaviors, and worldview through OER.
The same tactics are used over and over again. You may or may not know, that districts were “freed” from state curriculum control under the federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). They just didn’t realize that they were then coerced into politicized, globally data-tracked curriculum:
Did you know? The Obama administration created the curriculum curation system, the Learning Registry—and helped their tech giant partners create similar curriculum ratings/curation systems—in order that teachers’ and students’ choices could be manipulated and controlled by state assessment scores. The Obama administration’s Deputy Director of Ed Tech, Steve Midgley, speaking about how OER works. They state outright that they were starting to curate curriculum to ensure that teachers choose the “most relevant resource.” Midgley says, “[Through the Registry] we can actually find out this teacher assigned this material; this teacher emailed this to someone else; this teacher dragged it onto a smart board for 18 minutes. . . .” The Registry will also use “the math that I don’t understand which [will] let me know something about who you are and then let me do some mathematical operations against a very large data set and see if I can pair you with the appropriate relevant resource.”
The federal tripod of standards, assessments, and accountability is strangling local curriculum and assessment control. The tripod is being used to access and control what your children learn in the classroom.
The2017 National Education Technology Plan, the most-recently issued national technology plan, issued by the U.S. Department of Education, defines openly licensed educational resources as “teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under a license that permits their free use, reuse, modification, and sharing with others. Digital openly licensed resources can include complete online courses, modular digital textbooks as well as more granular resources such as images, videos, and assessment items.”¹
School systems across the country have been investing in openly licensed educational resources in efforts to reduce the cost and increase the flexibility and scalability of their resources. One of the most well-known examples was the New York State Department of Education’s use of federal Race to the Top funds to develop EngageNY, an entire openly licensed K-12 curriculum in reading and math. A 2015 report found that thirty percent of the nation’s math teachers and 25% of the nation’s English language arts teachers reported that they have used the materials in some way. The site continues to see millions of downloads each year with 17 million downloads of the math curriculum in 2018.
Several states have also invested in open education resources to help lower prices and provide course access. A few examples include Colorado, Texas, Utah, Washington, and Wisconsin. Non-profits have also been involved in providing state-aligned OER (Openstax, CK-12, and OER Commons). Indeed, many of these programs can provide entire curriculum free for crucial subjects like algebra 1 and secondary English language arts.
Daniel Williamson is managing director of OpenStax. He wrote in 2017…
Texas expanded its role as a national open educational resources (OER) leader this June when the Texas legislature passed several measures to increase OER use within the state of Texas.
Authored by Sen. Lois Kolkhorst (R-Brenham) and sponsored by Rep. Donna Howard (D-Austin), SB 810 creates a new grant program for higher ed that helps college and university professors transition to the use of OER in their classrooms. The program, administered by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, is modeled on Georgia’s successful Textbook Transformation Grants.
SB 810 also requires state colleges and universities to provide searchable information that will allow students to seek out courses that use only free materials.
For K-12, the legislature doubled its current budget for developing new OER that’s aligned to Texas’ curriculum standards. The $20M that is to be allocated over the next two years will prioritize “subject areas that constitute the bulk of school district purchases” and advanced high school STEM courses. This budget increase will expand upon the OER initiative that began with last year’s award of a contract to OpenStax to develop seven high school texts (texts which are slated to be in Texas classrooms this fall).
In separate legislation, SB 1784, which was authored by Sen. Larry Taylor (R-Friendswood) and sponsored by Rep. Dan Huberty (R-Humble), chairs of the committees over K-12 education in the Senate and House, updates the Texas OER statute. The updates include an updated definition of OER that uses language generally accepted by the OER community, as well as added provisions to recognize that OER sometimes contains public domain or fair use content.
Furthermore, the updates authorize the Commissioner of Education to use open licenses on material as a way to encourage its widest use by Texas schools. The exact requirements of the licenses are left to the Commissioner to determine, but the licensing provisions in SB 1784 are designed to be consistent with CC-BY and include wording that specifically allows the state to use a license that is “commonly applied to an open education resource.”
In making these changes, the updated bill moves away from original purpose — encouraging purchase of digital content by the state — and towards a more full embrace of today’s concept of high-quality, sharable, and adaptable OER.
Abbott appoint TEA Commissioner Mike Morath is fully implementing the federal OER plan.
I have seen these people at work in the past and the tactics that they use to deceive. When we were trying to STOP the same type of system to control what and how teachers are teaching in the classroom, it was called (CSCOPE) and rebranded into the TEKS Resource System. All, including the current TEA/Amplify/Gateway/OER (what ever they rebrand it into) are aligned to the global Common Core Standards that come out of (UNESCO) The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Unfortunately for these people but fortunately for the end users and We the People… I have been creating content and documenting it along the way. To understand how the TEA controls the purse strings to implement Common Core aligned curriculum into all school districts listen to this clip.
Interestingly, one of the key champions of the current online digital control system is Texas Representative Steve Toth. Back when we were fighting CSCOPE (which he used as a platform to get elected) he was correctly calling out the conflict of interest between former State Board of Education (SBOE) Thomas Ratliff for his lobbyist ties to Microsoft and the push for CSCOPE and the Common Core.
Now apparently State Representative Steve Toth sees no conflict of interest in Commissioner Mike Morath and the Technology giants having access to our children to modify their values, beliefs and behaviors. As long as it has bible stories in it. And Texas Public Policy Foundation (Funded by Tim Dunn) is on a mission to get the funding and framework in place to implement complete control over what and how our children will be taught. They are working to remove ALL local control. When you couple the HB 1605 OER technology with government regulated school choice they will have complete control. And they are using Pastors and the church to do it. This is evil.
To be clear HB 1605 is a very bad bill that was passed by both Republicans and Democrats alike in the last session. It must be unfunded and repealed. When you couple HB 1605 and the Universal School Choice they are desperately trying to pass, it will give them complete access to ALL students in public, private and homeschools.
One last yet very important note. HB 1605 is a national security issue. Please take the time to watch the video below. .
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