"We thought eliminating grades was the gold standard ideal," said Adam Carter, chief academic officer. "We thought, 'Those stupid grade levels are holding us back.'"
Global banking 1% have that goal of eliminating our US K-12 public school structure to go with apprenticeship K-career. Children sent off to work as apprentices as young as 6-8 years old which equates to elementary school. We discussed in detail this ending of what is our middle and high school grades sending children directly into corporate apprenticeships as free child labor.
That is the goal of ELIMINATING GRADES as a gold standard ideal.
We were told Clinton era education reform was all about protecting the feelings of that small percentage of the learning bell curve of children who get the Ds and Fs. There will always be our children who get the lower grades. Making sure there are living wages jobs for all US citizens is what our children need most. Using this SPARING THE CHILD FROM FEELING LESS THE ACHIEVER-----Clinton education reform took all of what was centuries of EDUCATION RIGOR from our classrooms ---never intending to be helping those D and F children.
THIS IS WHAT ELIMINATING GRADES DOES ---IT TAKES OUR ALREADY DIMINISHED EDUCATIONAL ACHIEVEMENT FROM CLINTON ERA AND BRINGS IT DOWN TO DARK AGES.
It now becomes simply finishing a module tied to vocational training.
'Assessment Instruments for Young Children Birth Through Age 5
Office of Early Learning and School Readiness...................Sandra Miller, Ph.D., Director
Office of Early Learning and School Readiness
Ohio Department of Education'
Assessment Instruments Listed in the Catalog
Adaptive Behavior/Social Emotional
Motor/Sensory
Pre-Academic
We discuss often how this effects our US public school students but MOVING FORWARD RACE TO THE TOP/COMMONER CORE takes all US 99% of citizens black, white, and brown citizens getting rid of those 5% global banking players.
We also take time in reading on public education policy to note who is selling these global banking 1% corporate education goals below we see CHALKBEAT/EDNEWS/WASHINGTON POST with our global CHAMBER OF COMMERCE PBS NPR all global banking corporate school education sites.
Ann Schimke
Ann Schimke covers healthy school topics and early childhood issues for Chalkbeat Colorado. She's written for The Washington Post as well as newspapers in Michigan, Virginia and Colorado. She holds a master's degree in education policy from the University of Michigan. She joined Chalkbeat (then EdNews Colorado) in 2012.
These articles all show pictures of our US children thinking all this is so good. Where do those US 5% having been shuttled into private schools these few decades fall in all this? Right there with the 99% having no more than an average learning ability.
Grade levels could be a thing of the past in schools focused on competency
Education May 13, 2015 2:55 PM EDT
Originally posted on Chalkbeat by Anika Anand and Ann Schimke on May 11, 2015
In a suburb just outside of Denver, Principal Sarah Gould stands outside a fifth-grade classroom at Hodgkins Elementary School watching students work. This classroom, she explains, is for students working roughly at grade level. Down the hall, there are two other fifth-grade classrooms. One is labeled "Level 2 and 3," for students who are working at the second and third-grade levels. The other is for students who are working at a middle-school level.
But some of these students won't necessarily stay in these classrooms for the whole school year. The students will move to new classrooms when they've mastered everything they were asked to learn in their first class. This can happen at any time during the year.
"We have kids move every day. It's just based on when they're ready," Gould said.
Six years ago, Hodgkins Elementary worked the same way most schools and districts do: Students were assigned to a class for a fixed amount of time and were promoted when the time ended, assuming that they had gained the skills they needed for the next class — and sometimes even if they had not.
Now, the school is part of a growing movement toward "competency-based education," which replaces "seat time" with skills as the main standard for whether students are promoted. Competency-based education goes by many names — mastery-based, proficiency-based and performance-based education — but the idea is the same: Students are measured by what they've learned, not the amount of time they've spent in the classroom.
Innovations in technology and how teachers can monitor students' progress, along with changes to regulations about how long students must spend in class, have made it possible for schools and districts to adopt competency-based systems in an effort to use students' time in school more effectively.
At least 40 states have one or more districts implementing competency education, and that number is growing, according to a 2013 KnowledgeWorks report with the most up to date numbers on the trend.
But competency-based education doesn't look the same across the country. In fact, advocates say schools and districts fall on a "competency continuum," based on which aspects of competency education they've implemented.
When advocates talk about a "pure" model of competency education, they describe a model that isn't bound by grade levels or the Carnegie unit, a measure of the amount of time a student has studied a subject in class. At that end of the spectrum, schools like Hodgkins or New York City's Olympus Academy have essentially gotten rid of standard K-12 grade levels and only move students to the next learning level if they've proven they've mastered the concepts. (The schools generally must track students by grade level for funding and state testing purposes, even if their classes are not designed for single-age cohorts. Some advocates, including officials in Hodgkins's district, want state policies changed to allow competency-based learning schools to track students differently.)
"Education systems in the past have been notorious for jumping on bandwagons but nothing substantially changes under the surface. In our model everything has changed under the surface," said Oliver Grenham, chief education officer of Hodgkins's district, Adams County School District 50 in Colorado.
But at the same time, advocates acknowledge that the "full system overhaul" is a heavy lift and that schools need to start from a place that makes the most sense for them based on their time, resources, and community support. For some districts, the clearest path has been to create new schools based on the model, as Philadelphia did this year when it opened three high schools that assign students to "workshops" rather than classes.
The schools retain some of the traditional school organization, but are working toward replacing standard grading with a detailed, competency-based matrix that lets students know at all times where they stand and helps them understand their own strengths and weaknesses.
Traditional letter grades don't give students much information about what they know and can do, said Thomas Gaffey, the technology coordinator at Building 21, one of the three Philadelphia schools. The competency-based evaluation he helped design "makes the learning process transparent," he said.
More often, schools have nestled a competency-based philosophy within their existing operations, maintaining their grade-level arrangements while adapting how they assess student learning.
"We're a hybrid, which is what I think appeals to people who look at our model," said Brian Stack, principal of Sanborn High School in New Hampshire. "It's not vastly different from what they do with a traditional model, but it's not so far out on the spectrum that it's unattainable for them to get to where we are."
At Sanborn, students are still enrolled in traditional classes and still receive credit for class at the end of the year. But all the courses have defined core competencies and if students don't gain those competencies, they have to do extra work in order to earn credit for the class, rather than simply accepting the lower grade. The school is also in the process of doing away with numerical grades in favor of a scale that ranges from "limited progress" to "exceeding expectations."
"We grade kids every day," Stack said. "The difference is, what are you doing with that grade? Are you using that as feedback to tell students how they're doing and to inform instruction or are you just using it as a determination to say did they know it or not?"
Stack said as much as he would like for his school to be totally unbound by seat time, its model is still dictated by the school calendar.
"If we can't move kids when they're ready, we can at the very least try to personalize instruction to the extent possible when they're with us," he said.
Other schools offer their own reasons for maintaining grade levels while rolling out a competency-based approach.
After a competency-learning pilot in math yielded major gains for California's Summit Preparatory charter schools, the network adopted the approach in most academic subjects — and considered going further.
That changed when Summit officials thought through what they would lose by doing away with grade levels and realized that students benefit by belonging to a fixed cohort that advances together. "If students can plug into a project that is rich and full of layers, we don't need to get rid of grade levels," he said.
Schools operated by Rocketship, a national charter school network, regroup students four to six times a day based on their academic skills, in a robust example of how educators can use student data to foster competency-based learning.
"But we still have grade levels because of the social-emotional needs of students, especially early elementary," said CEO Preston Smith. "Five-year-olds need to be with 5-year-olds most of the day so they can develop the life skills they need to be successful."
Advocates of competency-based learning say the diversity among schools' approaches should be expected — and appreciated — as more experiments take shape.
"Each school and each district is on its own journey and they're going to have different entry points," said Susan Patrick, president of the International Association for K-12 Online Learning, which champions online and blended learning models that are often part of competency-based programs. "Most school leaders who are implementing this well … had been working on the building blocks for three to six years."
Lillian Pace, senior director of national policy for KnowledgeWorks, said, "Naturally, you're going to see a tremendous amount of diversity in implementation. … That's healthy. We need to try different approaches. We need to figure out ultimately which methods are the most effective."
For now, the experience of schools like Hodgkins suggests that competency-based education might help engage students in their learning.
When kindergarten teacher Jenn Dickman recently asked for volunteers to share their "data notebooks" with a visitor, her students rushed en masse to grab the binders.
Jayleen Vasquez was first in line. She flipped quickly through the pages—each a mini-progress report of her skills. At the top were headers such as, "I can read a Level D book with purpose and understanding" or "I can read 50 sight words in 100 seconds or less."
Underneath were columns shaded in colorful crayon hues showing whether she'd met the goal, and if not, how much farther she had to go.
"I passed these. I got those two right and this one I just forgot one. I did not pass this one," she said, gesturing to one page. Then she concluded with pride: "I passed all this."
This story was produced as a collaboration among all news organizations participating in the Expanded Learning Time reporting project. Reporting was contributed by Sue Frey for EdSource California, and Dale Mezzacappa for the Philadelphia Notebook.
Let's look broadly at private schools that cropped up during CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA to replace our US public K-university by global banking 1%---NOT RELIGIOUS-----many being religious freemason private schools ----here today and gone tomorrow.
Since MOVING FORWARD is morphing to far-right, authoritarian, militaristic dictatorship LIBERTARIAN MARXISM---these OLD WORLD freemason structures always disappear.
Catholic secondary schools in Ireland 'disappearing' - La ...
international.la-croix.com/news/catholic... Catholic secondary schools in Ireland 'disappearing' . There is a need to retain Catholic second level schools as an option for parents, says educator.
A Rich, Disappearing Legacy Remembering Black boarding ...diverseeducation.com/article/3117
Aug 13, 2003 · A Rich, Disappearing Legacy Remembering Black boarding schools: A tradition obscured by desegregation's impact
Below we see other freemason private schools ---the well-known LIBERTY UNIVERSITY-----Notre Dame-----Brigham Young----all admittedly freemason---NOT RELIGIOUS.
"My father would say in those early days," Falwell said, "that the goal for Liberty was to become for evangelicals what Notre Dame was for Catholics, what Brigham Young was for Mormons."
What we see here is the closing of those private freemason schools at the middle-high school level. We will see more and more of these freemason schools closing even at the elementary level and as colleges because MOVING FORWARD has only global corporate campus schools-----not interested in pretending to support religion.
History repeats itself remember. Every time MOVING FORWARD goes to far-right wing extreme wealth extreme poverty LIBERTARIAN MARXISM-----FAKE religious freemason schools disappear.
History repeats itself remember. Every time MOVING FORWARD goes to far-right wing extreme wealth extreme poverty LIBERTARIAN MARXISM-----FAKE religious freemason schools disappear. They are disappearing not from lack of money or funding---MOVING FORWARD kills centuries of I AM MAN education opportunities for all but those global 1%.
REAL left social progressives have always supported Freedom of Religion and Separation of Church and State because these are the policies that actually do protect our 99% of WE THE PEOPLE wanting their religious practices. Those at the top of religious structures are simply global banking 1%.
Can Catholic Schools Be Saved?
Lacking nuns and often students, a shrinking system looks for answers
By Peter Meyer
Spring 2007 / Vol. 7, No. 2
Bobby and I stood outside the small public elementary school that our children attended, pondering our respective 1st graders' prospects. The weeds poked up through the asphalt, the windows on the 30-year-old building were dirty, the playground equipment was rotting. Inside the K–2 school, some 600 kids were being prepared for academic underachievement: in a few more years two-thirds of them would be unable to read at grade level.
"Nothing wrong with this place," Bobby finally said, "that a busload of nuns wouldn't solve."
I laughed. I knew exactly what he meant. We grew up on opposite sides of the country (he in New York and I in Oregon), but we both grew up Catholic, in the '50s, and that meant one thing if nothing else: nuns.
The guardians of moral order and academic achievement for several generations of Catholic boys and girls, these robed religious women ruled with—well, with rulers. And paddles. And, sometimes, fists. Before "tough love" there was Sister Patrick Mary or Sister Elizabeth Maureen. Before No Child Left Behind there were behinds burnished by a swift kick from a foot that emerged without warning from under several acres of robes.
Indeed, our childhood memories, different in detail, were singular in their moral clarity: we knew what a busload of nuns could do. They would march up and down the aisles. (Yes, there would be aisles, in a room filled with 30 to 50 kids—phooey on class size.) And with a glance from behind their starched white wimples, we would learn.
The problem is that there no longer are busloads of nuns; in fact, most schools would be lucky to have a Mini Cooper's worth of such minimum-wage professional teachers. Their ranks have declined by a staggering 62 percent since 1965 (from 180,000 to 68,000). The staff composition of Catholic schools has similarly been turned on its head, from some 90 percent female religious in the '50s to less than 5 percent today (see Figure 1). "The school system had literally been built on their backs," reported Anthony Bryk, Valerie Lee, and Peter Holland in their 1992 study Catholic Schools and the Common Good, "through the services they contributed in the form of the very low salaries that they accepted." Consequently, costs have soared; average annual tuition has gone from next to nothing to more than $2,400 in elementary schools and almost $6,000 in high schools.
Despite a growing Catholic population (from 45 million in 1965 to almost 77 million today, making it the largest Christian denomination in the United States), Catholic school enrollment has plummeted, from 5.2 million students in nearly 13,000 schools in 1960 to 2.5 million in 9,000 schools in 1990. After a promising increase in the late 1990s, enrollment had by 2006 dropped to 2.3 million students in 7,500 schools. And the steep decline would have been even steeper if these sectarian schools had to rely on their own flock for enrollment: almost 14 percent of Catholic school enrollment is now non-Catholic, up from less than 3 percent in 1970 (see Figure 2). When Catholic schools educated 12 percent of all schoolchildren in the United States, in 1965, the proportion of Catholics in the general population was 24 percent. Catholics still make up about one-quarter of the American population, but their schools enroll less than 5 percent of all students (see Figure 3).
What happened to the Catholics? What happened to a school system that at one time educated one of every eight American children? And did it quite well.
May I Have Your Attention, Please!
As most educators know, Catholic schools work and have worked for a long time. Sociologist James Coleman and colleagues Thomas Hoffer and Sally Kilgore, in 1982, were among the first to document Catholic schools' academic successes, in High School Achievement: Public and Private Schools. A variety of studies since, by scholars at the University of Chicago, Northwestern, the Brookings Institution, and Harvard, have all supported the conclusion that Catholic schools do a better job educating children, especially the poor and minorities, than public schools.
WOW! WHAT HYPER-GLOBAL BANKING NEO-LIBERAL HEDGE FUND IVY LEAGUE SCHOOL DATA THERE!
According to the Common Good authors, Catholic high schools—and many believe that this applies to elementary schools as well—"manage simultaneously to achieve relatively high levels of student learning, distribute this learning more equitably with regard to race and class than in the public sector, and sustain high levels of teacher commitment and student engagement." One of the keys, they concluded, is the organization of Catholic schools. Parochial schools are less likely to fall into the public-school habit of "structuring inequities": public schools offer students the chance to take weaker academic courses while Catholic school courses are "largely determined by the school." The irony, say Bryk et al., is that such a "constrained academic structure" contributes more to "the common school effect" than the potluck served by the public schools. Catholic schools give less weight to "background differences" of their students and thus do not allow those background differences to be "transformed into achievement differences." Even after adjusting for student background differences, Bryk and his colleagues found significant "school effects" on academic achievement.
"You know the story about the kid whose parents got fed up with their son's constant discipline problems in the public school?" asked James Goodness, communications director of Newark Catholic Schools, while entertaining journalists at a recent archdiocesan-sponsored luncheon. Newark, the tenth-largest parochial district in the country, closed nine elementary and two secondary schools in 2005, with a corresponding enrollment decline of 5 percent, from some 47,300 to 44,750 students. Goodness, with his story about the problem public-school boy, was explaining what made Catholic schools special. "'That's it!' says the dad. 'It's Catholic school for you.' They sent him. They waited. No calls from school. 'What's up?' the dad finally asks. 'The nuns been boxin' your ears?' 'No,' says the kid. 'They didn't have to. When I got to school, I saw this guy hanging from a cross with nails in his hands and feet and I figured they meant business.'"
What Catholic schools are very good at, it seems, is getting kids' attention. No surprise to those of us who grew up in them. The establishment of order and discipline, in all things: We wore uniforms. We had homework. We had to eat our lunch, even the peas and carrots. My wife remembers classmates having to put a nickel in the "mission box" if they mispronounced a word—"libary" instead of library or "pitcher" instead of picture—at her Jersey City parochial grade school. Grammar counted. Posture counted. So did skirt length. It was all for the greater glory of God, of course. By reaching for God, the "all-knowing," so the nuns said, we might know something even if our reach fell short. There were no prizes for just showing up. All of it, we knew, on some preternatural level, made us "better." And the research seems to support that view. In fact, one of the "surprises" for the Common Good researchers, who deemed Catholic schools' academic focus both consistent and laudable, was that the schools seemed to succeed even when the teaching and the curriculum were "ordinary."
Such Catholic rigor was part missionary zeal—to spread "the word"—and part defense against the encroachments of an increasingly secular world. And secular, for Catholics, meant a certain slackness in moral and academic discipline. In the United States, the so-called "wall of separation" between church and state, between order and freedom, eventually forced Catholics to build their own school system, the only country in the world where they have one (see sidebar). The battles to safeguard order, and academic excellence, were fought early and often. At the turn of the 20th century, for example, Catholic school leaders refused to follow their public school counterparts into a vocational and utilitarian tracking system. "Catholic youth should not be the 'hewers of wood and drawers of water,' but should be prepared for the professions or mercantile pursuits," went one early protestation by the Association of Catholic Colleges.
Catholic schools toyed with progressive education models in the 1970s, but gave it up, report the authors of the Common Good, when they realized they could not be all things to all children. Catholic high schools soon "returned to conventional class-period organization, heightened academic standards and a renewed emphasis on a core of academic subjects."
Everything but a Plague of Locusts
So, if they are so good, why are Catholic schools disappearing? And if there are so many more Catholics, why are there fewer schools? No more nuns? No more money? Charter schools? Loss of faith? Indolence? Scandal? Irrelevance? The answer seems to be all of that—and less.
"The answer is fairly simple," says James Cultrara, director for education for the New York State Catholic Conference. "The rising cost of providing a Catholic education has made it more difficult for parents to meet those rising costs."
YOU MEAN IT TAKES A GLOBAL 1% TO AFFORD AN ORDINARY US BROAD DEMOCRATIC PUBLIC SCHOOL EDUCATION?
The Catholic-school story has been covered, as education journalist Samuel Freedman wrote in the New York Times, "as either a sob story or a sort of natural disaster, the inevitable outcome of demographics." But Freedman believes that "there need not have been anything inevitable about the closings," especially since Catholic populations are increasing.
Brooklyn closed 26 elementary schools in 2005, even though its Catholic population has grown by some 600,000 since 1950. "But the other trends were unmistakable," says Thomas Chadzutko, superintendent of the diocese's schools, and the man who presided over the closings. "Enrollment was down and expenses up."
The loss of nuns has undoubtedly added to the financial burden. But demographic change, and the failure to respond to it, has created other burdens. Since the Catholic school "system" is actually a loose and quite decentralized confederation of 7,500 schools supported, for the most part, by 19,000 parishes in more than 150 dioceses, it took "the Church" some time to see the trends, much less develop new strategies to respond to them.
"We have a system of schools, not a school system," explains Newark's new vicar for education, Father Kevin Hanbury. "The local parishes traditionally have been responsible for the schools." Those parishes, and their schools, feel change at the local, neighborhood level quite quickly. But it takes time for the huge, theologically monolithic, and institutionally undemocratic Church to react.
The flight from inner cities to the suburbs by working- and middle-class Americans affected Catholic schools as much as, if not more than, it did public schools. Downtown churches were suddenly filled by poor immigrants from Catholic nations (Latin America and the Caribbean) without a tradition of Catholic schools, much less a habit of paying for them. According to the National Catholic Educational Association (NCEA), between 2000 and 2006, nearly 600 Catholic elementary and secondary schools closed, a 7 percent decline, and nearly 290,000 students left, almost 11 percent. The largest declines were among elementary schools in 12 urban dioceses (New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Brooklyn, Cleveland, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Boston, Newark, Detroit, and Miami), which together have lost almost 20 percent of their students (more than 136,000) in the last five years.
One factor is that the public schools in the suburbs are not like the public schools that Catholics tried to avoid in the cities. "Folks got to the suburbs and discovered that it was not only very expensive to build new schools, but that the public schools were not that bad," says Patrick Wolf, professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas.
And charter schools, says Father Ronald Nuzzi, director of the Alliance for Catholic Education (ACE) leadership program at Notre Dame, "are one of the biggest threats to Catholic schools in the inner city, hands down. How do you compete with an alternative that doesn't cost anything?"
Ron Zimmer, of the RAND Corporation, and two colleagues studied the impact of charters in Michigan, one of the most chartered states in the nation, and determined that private schools were taking as big a hit as traditional public schools because of charters. "Private schools will lose one student for every three students gained in the charter schools," they wrote. This had, they said, "not only…a statistically significant effect on private schools but an effect that is economically meaningful."
And then came the sex abuse scandals. There has been nothing quite so shattering as the endless parade of headlines about priests abusing children. The Louisville Archdiocese was hit with almost 200 sex abuse suits in a single six-month period in 2003. In April of that year, the Boston Archdiocese revealed that it carried a $46 million deficit, "the largest any diocese has ever had," according to the New York Times, because it had paid out more than $150 million in legal settlements in sex abuse cases. The crisis in Boston was heightened, said Cardinal Sean O'Malley, because parish donations fell off by several million dollars as a result of the scandal. The diocese closed more than 60 parishes, and dozens of parish schools. A Gallup survey in 2003 found that one in four Catholics withheld donations to the Church because of the scandal. Four dioceses, of the 195 administrative units in the American Catholic church—Davenport, Iowa; Portland, Oregon; Spokane, Washington; and Tucson, Arizona—have already declared bankruptcy because of lawsuits over sex abuse. Others, like Boston, are on the brink.
Marketing for Miracles
"The world changed" was a common refrain of Catholic educators with whom I spoke over several months of research. And it was clear that they included the Catholic world in that assessment. Faith, on many levels, has been shaken. The "new reality," says Samuel Freedman of the Times, is that Catholic schools "will have to become expert fundraisers to survive." And marketers. And promoters. And lobbyists. And miracle workers. Catholics are scrambling to find their footing in a world of charters, vouchers, and tax credits.
CATHOLIC SCHOOL HISTORY LESSON
Spanish and French colonists brought schools (which were Catholic) with them to the New World in the 1600s. There were parochial primary schools in Pennsylvania in the 1700s. The first "female academy" in America was in New Orleans, established by the Ursuline Sisters from France in 1727.
Catholic schools in those days were often supported by public funds. St. Peter's in New York City applied for and received state aid in 1806, as did St. Patrick's in 1816. Catholic schools continued to receive public monies in Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Connecticut, and New Jersey almost to the end of the 19th century. New York State did not outlaw the practice until 1898.
Catholics perceived "public school" as not just a threat to Catholics, but, as the 1917 Catholic Encyclopedia (CE) recounts, an "imminent danger to faith and morals." And in that threat was born the modern Catholic school system, as Catholic bishops convened in Baltimore in 1884 and ordered each parish to build a school and each Catholic kid to enroll. Between 1880 and 1900, as the immigrants began arriving, the number of students in Catholic schools more than doubled.
"The vastness of the system," the CE reported at the turn of the 20th century, "may be gauged by the fact that it comprises over 20,000 teachers, over 1,000,000 pupils, represents $100,000,000 worth of property; and costs over $15,000,000 annually." The Church saw its "missionary" duty to educate the new immigrants and in 1910, Catholics counted 293 Polish, 161 French, and 48 Italian
schools, and a smattering of Slovak and Lithuanian schools. But the "vastness" now represented such a threat to the secular system that some considered Catholic schools "a destroyer of American Patriotism," and John Dewey pronounced the church "inimical to democracy," Many states simply outlawed Catholic schools. It took a Supreme court decision, in 1925, Pierce v. The Society of Sisters, to declare unconstitutional an Oregon law that required public school attendance. The Catholic "system" continued to grow and by 1965, a stunning 12 percent of all elementary and secondary students in the United States were enrolled in Catholic schools.
Then came sex, drugs, rock 'n roll—and Vatican II. The conclave of the world's Catholic bishops and cardinals called to order in 1962 by a cherubic old pontiff, John XXIII, turned the Church on its head at a time when the Beatles, Martin Luther King, and the Weather Underground were shaking civil and social foundations to their core. Swept away were the Latin Mass, the Baltimore Catechism, meatless Fridays, the high priest at an altar with his back to his congregation.
Not only are the nuns and priests now gone, but so too is a Catholic culture that for 100 years produced nuns and priests with faithful regularity. Of course, the debate as to whether the demise of Catholic didacticism and marshal order has been good or bad still roils Church waters. But the fact remains that the American Catholic school system isn't what it used to be.
—Peter Meyer
The Brooklyn diocese has hired a marketing firm. In Newark one of the first things Father Kevin Hanbury did when he was made vicar of education last year, before he hired a full-time marketing director, was host a white linen luncheon for the local media. "We have a story to tell," says Hanbury, "and we want to get it as close to page 1 as we can." The story, as Hanbury and other Catholic leaders tell it, is that Catholic schools not only work, but they are good for America. "Many of our schools are majority non-Catholic," says Karen Ristau, president of the NCEA. Ristau herself, a laywoman, represents a new, and some would say sobered, Church. She has an armful of academic credentials, but is also a grandmother. "We have high expectations for these little kiddos," she says, speaking of the 2-million-plus children in the Catholic school system that NCEA represents.
After I called the Memphis diocese to inquire about Catholic schools there, a FEDEX truck was at my door the next morning, with a package of press clips, brochures, and a CD. "Let me tell you this story," says a soft-spoken Mary McDonald, superintendent of Memphis Catholic Schools, also a grandmother. Though McDonald can now describe her first days on the job as superintendent in July of 1998 with some bemusement, when she received orders from her new boss, Bishop J. Terry Steib, to reopen already closed Catholic schools in downtown Memphis, she thought she'd been sent to hell.
Memphis was a sprawling Catholic diocese that had seen the number of its faithful increase by half, but its school enrollment decrease by almost a quarter. While there were new Catholic schools and Catholic schools with waiting lists in the suburbs, inner-city Memphis had become increasingly black and poor and non-Catholic. A half-dozen Catholic schools had closed over the previous two decades. The few schools that remained were in the death grip of aging parish populations, increased costs (the number of nuns in Memphis had dropped from 160 to 80), and dwindling enrollment.
No wonder "the Bishop's vision," as she calls it, sent McDonald right to the diocesan chapel and onto her knees. It didn't seem to matter to Bishop Steib that McDonald, a teacher and school principal during her 30 years in education, had never been a superintendent. "It was daunting," she recalls. "I just went out and started talking to anyone who would listen—and even those who didn't want to—about the value of and need for Catholic schools." And it didn't matter that the people in those slums where the empty schools were weren't Catholic, says McDonald, who often quotes a line attributed to Cardinal James Hickey of Washington, D.C., which has become a call to arms in the new crusade to save Catholic education: "We don't educate these children because they are Catholic, but because we are Catholic."
A year after McDonald started beating the bushes of Memphis for money, on a July day in 1999, her phone rang. The call was from someone offering "a multimillion-dollar donation," says McDonald, who told the Memphis Commercial Appeal at the time, "I know a miracle when I see one." Though the donors—there were more than one—remain anonymous to this day, their $15 million "was earmarked for Catholic education," says McDonald, recounting the story seven years later, as if she still can't believe it. "And they weren't even Catholic."
McDonald and her staff reopened St. Augustine, a 65-year-old school that had closed in 1995, within three weeks of receiving the donation. McDonald had 20 students registered in three days. The school opened with 30 students in two kindergarten classes. The students didn't need to have the $2,400 tuition—the donation paid for scholarships—and they didn't need to be Catholic.
"But the schools are truly Catholic," says McDonald. "We're not a public school. We're not a charter. We have the same values we've had for centuries—do the same things. We say prayer every day. We say the rosary at the same time every week. We have Mass for everyone." And uniforms, of course. "Our donors believed that Catholic education could make a difference," says McDonald, "and that Catholic schools are successful in inner cities." Within the next six years, eight more schools reopened, adding more than 1,300 students to the Jubilee School system, the name of the new initiative. Almost 90 percent of the students lived at or below the poverty level; over 80 percent were non-Catholic.
Has all the change and consolidation affected academics? No, says McDonald. Jubilee students are reading at grade level within a year of arriving; they are then outperforming their peers on standardized TerraNova tests. So far, none of the Jubilee students are old enough to have entered high school, but McDonald is optimistic. "We have a 99.9 percent graduation rate in our six high schools. Virtually no one drops out."
Capital Campaigns and a Voucher in Every Pot
A half-dozen years earlier in Washington, D.C., Cardinal Hickey had appointed a commission to study the problems confronting his diocese's inner-city schools. "The commission recommended closing 12 of 16 struggling schools," recalls Juana Brown, who was then the principal of one of those schools, Sacred Heart. Hickey issued his now-famous dictum: "Closing schools is not an option." He ordered the group back to the drawing board.
When it returned, Hickey's commission proposed creation of Faith in the City, an outreach and fundraising initiative that included a Center City Consortium (CCC). The task for CCC was solving the mystery of the less-than-holy trinity of modern Catholic education: financial distress, declining enrollment, and falling test scores.
This was the same mystery, on a smaller scale, that Mary McDonald was tackling in Memphis. Though details differed, the "can't fail" spirit has marked both enterprises and made them models for Catholic school rescue and reform.
"I tried to get people to look at Memphis," recalls George Loney, who directed Dayton's Catholic Urban Presence program, launched in 2002 to find a solution to that city's Catholic school crisis. Loney did help Dayton's Catholic schools, part of the Cincinnati Archdiocese, achieve "needed economies of scale" by consolidating. And test results are good. "I just can't get them to publicize them," he says.
The D.C. archdiocese announced in December of 2006 that it would close—"we prefer to say consolidate," says communications director Susan Gibbs—three elementary schools in the District. Yet the CCC schools seem to be working. Martin Davis of the Fordham Foundation writes that the 13 consortium schools achieved "remarkable growth" in grades 2 through 8 proficiency rates on the TerraNova from 2000 to 2005. "More remarkable," writes Davis, "those growth rates include test scores from 2004–05, when 300 high-poverty children from failing District of Columbia public schools entered consortium schools through the new D.C. voucher program."
In fact, vouchers are proving to be something of an antidote to the threat posed by charter schools. In Milwaukee, for example, according to Paul Peterson, while charters have "accelerated" the decline of private schools, vouchers seem to have "stabilized" them. Catholic schools in the city have been, since 1996, among the many private schools to benefit from the first state-supported voucher program. In 2005, each of the some 14,000 vouchers passed out in Milwaukee was worth $5,943 at any one of 117 eligible schools, 35 of them Catholic. (The 45 charters in the city, allowed since 1993, received between $7,000 and $9,000 per student.) The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel concluded in 2005 that "the principal effect of choice" in the city has been "to preserve the city's private schools, many of them Lutheran and Catholic."
David Prothero, associate superintendent of schools for the archdiocese, says the 6,000 Catholic-school voucher students represent nearly half of Milwaukee's Catholic school students. "That's significant."
"The irony is that the research shows that private schools don't make a big difference for high socioeconomic students," says Patrick Wolf, author of a recent study on voucher impacts in Washington, DC. "But they do make a difference for low-income students. And they're the ones who can't afford them."
"From a lawmaker's point of view," says Jim Cultrara, who is also co-chairman of the New York State Coalition of Independent and Religious Schools and spearheaded a serious, though unsuccessful, effort to have the New York State Legislature pass a tax credit in 2006, "it's fiscally prudent to provide financial assistance to enroll children in independent and religious schools. It helps reduce the tax burden and alleviate overcrowding in public schools. And that's not even counting the benefit of providing students with a quality education."
Thus, the significance of the scholarship programs and vouchers, and the Church's mission to the poor. The latest NCEA data show the mean tuition and per-pupil cost for Catholic elementary schools to be $2,607 and $4,268, and for high schools, $5,870 and $7,200, all below average public-school per-pupil expenditures. Thus, too, the persuasiveness of the argument that Catholic schools are a form of subsidy to the nation's public education system. Diane Ravitch wrote, in a Daily News editorial after hearing word of the Brooklyn diocese school closings in 2005, "It will be a loss for all New York City. The Catholic schools in this city have provided genuine choice for children from low-income and working-class families for more than 150 years. What is more, they have established a solid reputation for safety, academic standards and moral values. All of this has been supplied at a nominal cost to families and at no cost to taxpayers." The NCEA estimates the value of the Catholic school system's annual subsidy to the nation at $19.4 billion.
Through smart financial administration and management and aggressive fundraising, many dioceses are beginning to take back some ground lost in the last several decades. Pooling resources for such things as collecting tuition, custodial contracts, and paying salaries has saved money as well as freed principals to focus on academics. Through aggressive marketing and with a corporate board of "the rich and powerful," the D.C. consortium has raised $30 million in a capital campaign in the last five years. An annual gala fundraiser, co-sponsored by Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and Representative John Boehner (R-OH), last year garnered $1 million.
"Mr. Boehner has visited every one of our schools," says Brown. "He's 1 of 11 children and grew up Catholic and has been a tremendous booster."
It is probably no coincidence that Kennedy and Boehner were key Capitol Hill strategists in passing the historic No Child Left Behind Act. "Catholics believed in every child learning long before NCLB," says Juana Brown. "We have a mission to educate."
The dust has still not settled in the Church. But the new missionaries, like Brown and McDonald, seem as holy and determined as their habited predecessors. Given the Church's history, one would not want to bet against them, especially on the education front. Can tax credits, vouchers, and fundraisers substitute for the devotions of the faithful? Can marketing directors get those same faithful to forget about the sexual predators? These are serious and still largely unanswered questions. But there is a more vexing concern for some of us, even those of us used to imponderables such as the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin: where do you find a busload of nuns?
When we read US media telling us these private freemason universities are growing in size----they are talking about ONLINE STUDENT populations. Indeed, as our US public and private liberal arts and humanities colleges and universities are closed these OLD WORLD GLOBAL 1% FREEMASON structures will remain----but they are MOVING FORWARD RACE TO TOP/COMMONER CORE as fast as CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA global banking pols and players tell them.
THAT BILLION-DOLLAR EMPIRE was of course these few decades of CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA defunding and dismantling our US public K-university. This billion-dollar empire tied to OLD WORLD GLOBAL 1% KINGS AND QUEENS will do nothing for US 99% of WE THE PEOPLE---that 5% going under the bus in MOVING FORWARD.
Falwell as Smith and Ignatius Loyola are NOT exceptional business people----they are working for global banking 1% connecting all our Federal agencies to RAND/KNIGHTS OF MALTA-----which control all HIRING AND EMPLOYMENT which choose the universities from which they recruit---manufacturing WINNERS AND LOSERS in our US higher education.
When our US 5% freemason/Greeks allow these kinds of cronyism and corruption of our REAL free market economy fueled by strong public K-12----they end as LOSERS as well.
How Liberty University Built a Billion-Dollar Empire Online
With a hard sell to prospective students and huge amounts in taxpayer funding, Jerry Falwell Jr. transformed the evangelical institution into a behemoth.
By ALEC MacGILLIS/PROPUBLICAAPRIL 17, 2018
This article is a collaboration between The Times and ProPublica, the independent nonprofit investigative-journalism organization.
It was the start of the 2017 Fall Family Weekend at Liberty University, the school founded by Jerry Falwell Sr. 47 years ago in Lynchburg, Va., and the lines were especially long to get into the basketball arena for the mandatory thrice-weekly student convocation. There was a festive feel in the air — as usual, a live band kicked things off with some Christian rock.
Penny Nance, a newly named Liberty trustee who is the head of the socially conservative group Concerned Women for America, took the stage to say that with Donald Trump in the White House, the country was much closer to overturning Roe v. Wade and putting "true limits on the abortionist's hand." Tim Lee, a Texas preacher and evangelist who lost his legs in the Vietnam War, gave a sermon bemoaning "homosexuals and pornographers," declaring that one problem with "pulpits today is that they've got a lot of girlie men in them." A young man in front of me in a Nautica T-shirt clapped and shouted, "That's right!"
Liberty is spread out on more than 7,000 acres overlooking Lynchburg, a former railroad-and-tobacco town on the James River below the Blue Ridge Mountains. The student body on campus is 15,500 strong, and the university employs more than 7,500 people locally. Throughout the university grounds, there is evidence of a billion-dollar capital expansion: mountains of dirt and clusters of construction equipment marking the site of the new business school; the $40 million football-stadium upgrade, to accommodate Liberty's move into the highest level of N.C.A.A. competition; and the Freedom Tower, which at 275 feet will be the tallest structure in Lynchburg, capped by a replica of the Liberty Bell.
Jerry Falwell Jr., who has led the university since 2007, lacks the charisma and high profile of his father, who helped lead the rise of the religious right within the Republican Party. Yet what the soft-spoken Falwell, 55, lacks in personal aura, he has more than made up for in institutional ambition. As Liberty has expanded over the past two decades, it has become a powerful force in the conservative movement. The Liberty campus is now a requisite stop for Republican candidates for president — with George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney all making the pilgrimage — and many of Liberty graduates end up working in Republican congressional offices and conservative think tanks.
Liberty has also played a significant role in the rise of Donald Trump. Falwell was an early supporter of the reality-TV-star candidate, staying loyal through the release of the "Access Hollywood" tape and giving Trump a crucial imprimatur with white evangelical voters, who widely supported him at the polls. "The evangelicals were so great to me," Trump said in an interview last year. The first commencement speech he gave as president, last spring, was at Liberty. And in August, Falwell stood by Trump following his much-criticized remarks on the violent rally by white supremacists in Charlottesville, declaring on "Fox & Friends" that "President Donald Trump does not have a racist bone in his body."
Such steadfast allyship has prompted ridicule even from some fellow evangelical Republicans. But it makes more sense in light of an overlooked aspect of Liberty: its extraordinary success as a moneymaking venture. Like Trump, Falwell recognized the money to be made in selling success -- in this case, through the booming and lightly regulated realm of online higher education. Falwell's university has achieved the scale and stature it has because he identified a market opportunity and exploited it.
The real driver of growth at Liberty, it turns out, is not the students who attend classes in Lynchburg but the far greater number of students who are paying for credentials and classes that are delivered remotely, as many as 95,000 in a given year. By 2015, Liberty had quietly become the second-largest provider of online education in the United States, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education, its student population surpassed only by that of University of Phoenix, as it tapped into the same hunger for self-advancement that Trump had with his own pricey Trump University seminars. Yet there was a crucial distinction: Trump's university was a for-profit venture. (This month, a judge finalized a $25 million settlement for fraud claims against the defunct operation.) Liberty, in contrast, is classified as a nonprofit, which means it faces less regulatory scrutiny even as it enjoys greater access to various federal handouts.
By 2017, Liberty students were receiving more than $772 million in total aid from the U.S. Department of Education — nearly $100 million of it in the form of Pell grants and the rest in federal student loans. Among universities nationwide, it ranked sixth in federal aid. Liberty students also received Department of Veterans Affairs benefits, some $42 million in 2016, the most recent year for which figures are available. Although some of that money went to textbooks and nontuition expenses, a vast majority of Liberty's total revenue that year, which was just above $1 billion, came from taxpayer-funded sources.
And it was no secret which part of the university was generating most of that revenue, said Chris Gaumer, a Liberty graduate and former professor of English there. "When I was there, at faculty meetings the commentary was that online was funding the school, while they were trying to just break even on the residential side," he said. "It was understood that on the online side, they were making a killing."
Jerry Falwell Sr. was raised in Lynchburg by a Christian mother and a nonbelieving father, whose knack for business gained him a small empire of restaurants, bus lines, nightclubs and gas stations and eventually carried him into bootlegging. Falwell cast this dual inheritance in the terms of a clash between God and the Enemy, but it was hard not to see his career as a successful fusing of his parents' influences, salesmanship wrapped in Christian cloth.
He founded Thomas Road Baptist Church in the former offices of a bottling company in 1956 and soon began broadcasting recordings of his sermons on regional radio and television. In 1971, the same year his "Old Time Gospel Hour" went national, he founded Lynchburg Baptist College, subsidizing it with revenues from the show. "I believe there are thousands of young students who will catch the vision and who will carry what God is doing in Lynchburg to cities all over the continent and around the world," he declared at the time, according to his 1996 autobiography. At first the college was scattered in rented spaces around town — a vacant high school, a Ramada Inn -- but by 1977 it had been renamed Liberty Baptist College and moved up to an initial 2,000-acre swath of land on the mountain.
By 1984, nearly 400 local broadcasters around the nation were carrying "The Old Time Gospel Hour." The toll-free number flashing on the screen reportedly helped bring in more than $72 million per year in donations. Some $10 million of those funds flowed to the college, which at that point numbered about 4,500 students. Another of Falwell's enterprises pulled in about $12 million a year — the Moral Majority, an attempt to build a cross-denominational political coalition against the common foes of abortion rights and, as he later put it, "moral permissiveness, family breakdown and general capitulation to evil and to foreign policies such as Marxism-Leninism."
Liberty University, as it has been named since 1985, grew steadily, drawing families attracted by the "Liberty Way," which forbade premarital sex, drinking, smoking and cussing. In 1987, it secured tax-exempt status, which Falwell described in his autobiography as an existential necessity: "If a tax exemption could not be granted us," he wrote, "it would have been impossible to carry out the dream of a 50,000-student Christian university in Lynchburg."
But another element of the business model — evangelical broadcasting's aura of rectitude — was about to take a hit. That March, Jim Bakker resigned as head of the televangelist PTL ministry amid revelations of a sexual encounter with a former church secretary, Jessica Hahn, who received a payoff to keep quiet about it; Bakker later served just under five years in prison on a federal fraud conviction related to PTL's fund-raising. In 1988, the televangelist Jimmy Swaggart declared, "I have sinned," following reports of his consorting with a prostitute in New Orleans; three years later, the police pulled him over with another prostitute in Southern California.
No such scandals attached to Falwell, who succeeded Bakker as host of "The PTL Club." But the bubble had burst. Amid what Falwell later referred to as the "credibility crunch" caused by the televangelist scandals, the college's finances deteriorated. Within a few years, annual contributions dropped by $25 million; the college's debt swelled to more than $100 million.
In 1996, the accrediting body overseeing Liberty presented a list of more than 100 "recommendations" for staying accredited, including a demand that it reduce its debt. Falwell went on a 40-day liquids-only fast, praying for deliverance. "I am certain that we will become a world-class university training champions for Christ in every important field of study," Falwell vowed in his autobiography. "And I am asking God to give me more time to guide and fund that dream."
One educational novelty that Falwell dabbled in, starting in the mid-'70s, was an early form of distance learning. Liberty would mail lecture videotapes and course packets to paying customers around the country — at first just certificate courses in Bible studies, and by the mid-'80s, accredited courses in other subjects as well. By the time of Liberty's financial embattlement, other education innovators had taken the idea much further — none more so than a man named John Sperling.
Sperling was an unlikely capitalist entrepreneur. The son of a failed farmer in the Missouri Ozarks, he joined the Merchant Marine, embraced socialism and ended up receiving a Ph.D. in history from the University of Cambridge. He got a job teaching at San Jose State University, where he took over the faculty union and led a big strike in 1968. His humble origins and early socialist leanings had given him a jaundiced view of elite schools, and his experience teaching a course to police officers and teachers as part of a federally funded effort to reduce juvenile delinquency furthered his belief that traditional colleges were leaving out a whole swath of Americans eager for higher education. He decided to start a university of his own — not a nonprofit but a for-profit, and not in California, where he had clashed with skeptical accreditors, but in the laxer regulatory climate of Arizona.
In 1976, Sperling rented space in a boilermakers' union hall in Phoenix and started offering weekly classes there to eight students — all adults who'd had some college education and were looking to complete their degrees. A decade later, University of Phoenix had 6,000 students. But things really took off three years later, in 1989, when Sperling started offering M.B.A.s online through Prodigy, the early electronic communications service. Sperling took the university's parent company public in 1994; by 2000, enrollment had reached 100,000.
By the early 2000s, for-profit colleges were booming: Access to the internet was spreading, and the Bush administration was employing a notably light regulatory touch, even as the programs were devouring an ever-greater share of federal student aid. Among the adopters of Sperling's model was Falwell, who in 2004 began expanding the family's primitive distance-learning programs into what would become known as Liberty University Online.
In his autobiography, Falwell praised Jerry Jr.'s business instincts, crediting him with saving Liberty from ruin through his management of its debt. "God sent him to me just in time," he wrote. "He is more responsible, humanly speaking, for the miraculous financial survival of this ministry than any other single person." When Falwell died in 2007 at age 73, his younger son, Jonathan, took over the pulpit at Thomas Road Baptist, and Jerry Jr. took over the university — an indication of where the heart of the ministry now was.
As the Great Recession hit, laid-off Americans turned to online education to seek a new economic foothold. After years of trying to save Liberty by cutting costs, Falwell Jr. said, he adopted his father's vision of saving it through increasing revenues. In a recent telephone interview, Falwell described the surge in online enrollment as a kind of revelation. "It took us about 20 years to perfect" the distance-learning model, he said, "but when we did, that was about when everyone started getting high-speed internet in their homes, and we were the only nonprofit poised to serve that huge adult market of people who had not finished college or needed a master's degree to get a promotion."
We have already discussed these issues of religious freedom and separation of church and state as religious public policy so we want to take just a day in discussing US PUBLIC EDUCATION to remind our 99% of WE THE PEOPLE what has allowed the US to have the strongest religious freedoms in world history.
SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE eliminated OLD WORLD GLOBAL 1% KINGS AND QUEENS from our AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT ----I AM MAN strong centuries-old public education. The CHURCH for Christians as SYNAGOGUE for Jewish as MOSQUE for our Muslims as TEMPLE for our Buddhists/Hindi.
When US 99% WE THE PEOPLE allowed this contrived public policy as religions as NON-PROFITS----we opened the door to global banking KINGS AND QUEENS using religion in creating businesses. NOT RELIGIOUS---- this is why in US the TAX-FREE status of religious buildings were tied to SANCTUARIES----and as we see below our religious SANCTUARIES were given a special legal status -----
NONE OF THIS PERTAINED TO FREEMASON SCHOOLS---FREEMASON HOSPITALS---FREEMASON EMPLOYMENT CENTERS------ALL GLOBAL BANKING 1% ---NOT RELIGIOUS.
When global banking 1% use today's term SANCTUARY CITY/STATE they are again corrupting the policies tied to what was a religious designation for religious SANCTUARIES and it does not end well for our US 99% and our 99% of new immigrants since these policies are being written by global banking 1% killing 99% WE THE PEOPLE.
This term SANCTUARY CITY is tied to OLD WORLD GLOBAL 1% KINGS AND QUEENS and that STATE CHURCH as sanctuary....when US cities deemed FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES will have no religion.
It's a complete corruption of our centuries-old legal standings in religion and education having no intention of making things better for our 99% of citizens.
Places of Refuge: What Legal Basis for the Churches' Offer of 'Sanctuary'?
Neil Foster ABC Religion and Ethics 9 Feb 2016
Faced with criminal sanctions over their offer of 'sanctuary', churches may respond that the law recognises their right to free exercise of religion, or they may claim obedience to a higher law. Credit: Colors Hunter / Getty Images
In last week's high-profile decision of the High Court of Australia, Plaintiff M68-2015 v Minister for Immigration and Border Protection [2016] HCA 1, a 6-1 majority ruled that the Australian government is entitled to continue its policy of detaining certain asylum seekers off-shore in the Pacific nation of Nauru.
In the aftermath of the decision, and in response to the plight of a group of mothers and their babies and young children who have been receiving medical treatment in Australia, and will now have to be returned to the dreadful conditions in Nauru, a number of Christian churches went public with an offer of "sanctuary" for those who are supposed to be returned.
It seems worthwhile to reflect on the legal issues surrounding "sanctuary" in Australia.
Background to the law of "sanctuary"
Most people would be aware that church buildings in the past were places of refuge, where some wrongdoers could seek sanctuary from arrest. This idea no doubt had its roots in the Bible, where in the Old Testament there are some recorded references to people seeking sanctuary at the altar of the Temple (see 1 Kings 1:49-53; 2:28-34).
The law of Moses also saw a system of "cities of refuge" (Joshua 20:1-6) where those who had committed what today would be called "involuntary manslaughter" could seek to flee from revenge at the hands of the family of the deceased.
In the early days of the common law of England, this was implemented by a system of sanctuary which applied in local churches in different ways. With the growing power of the secular monarchy, areas where wrongdoers could escape the King's justice were increasingly reduced, and in 1624 sanctuary as a common law doctrine was abolished by statute.
Any legal operation of the doctrine, then, was well and truly removed from the common law before the European settlement of Australia, and not part of that law which was "received" into our system.
In any event, the continuation of a law which gave special recognition to the status of church buildings was unlikely to have survived the process of Federation, where at least for the purposes of the Commonwealth, no "establishment" of religion was possible under s.116 of the Constitution.
Here is a good public policy discussion on church and state outing global banking 1% and their corruption of our REAL POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES. More important for this week's education discussion is this----there has been a long history these several centuries of broad public education where FAKE ALT RIGHT ALT LEFT global banking 1% RELIGIOUS freemason schools move in to take over our public K-UNIVERSITY and then DISAPPEAR using FAR-RIGHT WING MARXIST policies.
We KNOW that is what is MOVING FORWARD today------as global banking tied to a RAND CORPORATION/MITRE CORPORATION controls all hiring and employment in US manufacturing WINNERS attending religious freemason schools and losers of our US broad private and public arts and humanities schools---VOILA---they will simply DISAPPEAR.
Please stop chasing WAG THE DOG for education and employment----even that 5% of US players are going under the bus in MOVING FORWARD. Remember that term WAG THE DOG was used during CLINTON ERA.
'wag the dog
to cause a persuasive movement in any large body of influence, i.e., a mass of people, through means by which a lesser influence is utilized'.
Our religions are in SANCTUARIES------religious freemason schools are the realm of global banking 1% KINGS AND QUEENS.
Has/How has Russia gone from being a far-left communist state to a far-right nationalist state?
Christopher S. Mauch
Christopher S. Mauch, Political Afficiando
Answered Aug 26 2016 ·
I would argue that the modern Russian state isn't ideologically all that different than its predecessor the Soviet Union. The reason why it might appear to have switched trajectories is due to the false dichotomy implicate in the "left/right" political spectrum. Left/Right aren't particularly useful political terms in almost any context and become especially meaningless when you leave "western" political spheres.
Let's take Saudi Arabia as an example. Is it a left wing country or a right wing country? Well, your knee jerk reaction might be to say that it is clearly a right wing country because it is ruled by both a an active monarchy and a very conservative religious class. But Saudi Arabia also has almost no free market to speak of. It's economy is probably closer to Communist/Socialist ideals than China or Russia ever were.
While admittedly Saudi's aren't all paid an equal amount, the role of the state in the economy is hard to over emphasize. And furthermore, the services the government provides free to its citizens is basically unparalleled outside of the Arabian Peninsula.
What is liberal and what is conservative a both relative, and need to be looked at within the relevant contexts in which they exist. In the United States for example, conservatives typically advocate free markets, capitalism, and advocate unregulated access to guns. In many ex-soviet states conservatives advocate government intervention in the economy, gun control, and are very antagonistic towards free markets, globalism, or capitalism.
Another example of this is the "conservative" Communist Party of China vs. "conservative" American Republicans. Conservatives in China mandate the biggest abortion scheme in history, while Republicans in the United States' opposition to Abortion is near hyperbolic proportions. Liberals in China are MORE likely to be religious than politically conservative Communist Party Members, who are more likely to be Atheists and antagonistic towards the idea of religion and it's practice.
Now you specifically mentioned the Orthodox Church, so I will try to address it although I think it is both more and less important than you think. With the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia lost its "Communist" ideology that was very useful in controlling its population. The mantel of Marxist-Leninism having been pretty thoroughly discredited, it could not so easily be restored. That is where the Russian Orthodox Church comes in. You see, unlike Catholicism which is ruled/administered by the independent Holy Roman See and an elected Pope (much to the chagrin of the Communist Party in China) the Russian Orthodox Church is administered by the Russian Patriarch who serves only with the approval of the Russian State. This effectively makes the Russian Orthodox Church a very effective means of social/ideological control in lieu of Soviet Ideology (ironic isn't it?)