There is a very deceptive petition now being circulated by Care2, which customarily promotes worthy causes. This petition asks you to sign if you support education as a civil right.
When you open it, it asks you to support the punitive accountability measures of NCLB, and criticizes the Senate ESEA bill for not including the mandated tough accountability that closed public schools in poor communities, but did not close opportunity gaps.
It says:
“Keep Education Bill’s Civil Rights Promise
23,101 SIGNATURES BY:Loron HaysTARGET:Senate Majority and Minority Leadership and Education Committee Chairs
“The US Senate has passed Every Child Achieves without the equity provisions that are so central to equitable education opportunities for ALL children.
“Without access to educational resources and much needed Title 1 funding, many of America’s children will continue to slip through the cracks. This Ed Week article articulates the concern being raised by some advocacy groups that, without meaningful federal accountability, educational opportunities for every student are not properly protected.
“According to The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights’ letter to Congress, ESEA, in its current form, promises that the opportunity gap for minorities, ESL students, and students receiving special education services will remain in place due to a push from the House for less federal involvement with providing equal services for disadvantaged students.
“Differences between the House bill and the Senate bill must be reconciled before it is placed on the President’s desk which means THERE IS STILL TIME TO ACT. It is our duty to remind the Leadership that the Every Child Achieves Act (ECAA) is civil rights legislation. We must act NOW as their summer break – beginning July 30 and lasting until September – is quickly approaching.
“Sign the petition today. Let your voice be heard. Tell congress to strengthen the accountability in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and provide the necessary support to close the opportunity gap for underserved student populations in underperforming schools.
“We MUST invest in ALL of our students, not just the privileged.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
How much deception can the Bill Gates Cabal buy?
LikeLike
Did Bill Gates or a member of his oligarch cabal donate to this group too?
LikeLike
The petition is represented as if initiated by Loren Hays. Have not found a living person that looks like a likely source, assuming this is the name of the treal person. Given the sources that Loren is citing I imagine that the sponsor is a shill for one of the foundations that has funded EdWeek or the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights.
I do not have the tiers of investigative tools to find out more. OF course, that is the point of this kind of lobbying by stealth.
LikeLike
Make no mistake, NCLB , Race to the Top and the Privatizing movement are really not about education, understanding children, the learning process or about the best interests of children !!!! If we are old enough…..and if we study the history of education, we will see why, at one time, politicians, the federal government and business executives were not considered to be the ones who should be making educational decisions !!!
LikeLike
McGraw-Hill Ed. getting out of state testing.
http://mobile.edweek.org/c.jsp?cid=25919781&bcid=25919781&rssid=25919771&item=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.edweek.org%2Fv1%2Few%2F%3Fuuid%3D5D81FF94-36F6-11E5-A1AE-71C9B3743667&cmp=ENL-EU-NEWS1-RM
LikeLike
Headline:
PEARSON WINS TOUGH FIGHT WITH McGRAW-HILL.
LikeLike
Does anyone believe online petitions have any effect? As most of you probably know because most of you have probably contacted a lawmaker, the first thing they ask you for is your zip code. They want to know if you live in their state or district.
More and more I think online petitions are just about collecting names and promoting the org or non-profit or lobbying group. The more names they have the more “impact” they can claim they’re having, which then justifies their continued existence.
LikeLike
Can anyone tell me where Care2 donates to (specifically, what organizations)? I have searched everywhere, and I am beginning to think Care2 is phony. When you make comments or sign their petitions, you get points which you can then have converted into charitable acts (for example, “raise one farm animal humanely.” However, no where does it state what organization is going to raise that farm animal humanely. There are no specifics available whatsoever. Very, very strange. Also, if you read the comments on Yelp, my comment and the comments of others, one gets a picture of a very dodgy organization with very little responsiveness to its members or transparency in general.
LikeLike
I think I found what you might be looking for on a Wiki page about Social Technology. I copied and pasted one section called “Criticism of the Internet Society” from that Wiki piece. I think you will find the third paragraph revealing.
I “feel” as if I invented the Internet because when I first got started in 1989, there were I had only about 1000 fellow engineers, and most of them were geeks in the anti-social sense, and I may have been alone in my faith in the social power of the Internet. It took six years for the Web to arrive, which was the necessary ingredient for a social Internet.
For a number of years, I was a key player on the Care2.com social activist site, where I moderated two groups that did phenomenal research, [Empathy] and [Katrina Hurricane and Flood Support ]. In particular, Katrina was first in Google searches during the crisis, and appeared to have an effect on Congress, as one of the members is a Congressman.
But Care2 devolved from an activist site to a nearly purely commercial site acting as a vehicle for Mumford’s corporate “false charity,” promoting misconceptions such as the hypothesis that hybrid vehicles will reverse global-warming.
As can be expected, an activist site will have contention, and none was more explosive between animal lovers and hunter-supporters. The contention was labeled as violent abuse, and specially hired cops terminated activists who where, for the most part, simply defending themselves. Criticism of Care2’s shift to commercialism was also a reason for termination, as it was perceived to impact revenue (hardly activist), and another reason for termination was for applying critical inquiry to the “causes” section, which is the vehicle for corporate false charity, also being revenue-related.
Further, Care2 partners such as the activist technology support system Convio, specialized in expanding non-for-profits that are specifically engineered to profit from loop-holes in non-profit laws, and the Petition Site that offers petition software, but then uses trickery to put Care2 members into the reach of the for-profit not-for-profits.
From my experience, I can only describe Care2, the most social of sites, as purely Fascist, but I should add that despite the Fascism there, activism persists, but only “below the radar.”
I have also been active on the Rangefinderforum.com, Facebook, and of course the wikimedia empire. I have similar criticisms for all these sites.
One site that is actually very different and very successful is the purely commercial meetup.com. It only seeks to bring people to face-to-face meeings, for a fee.–John Bessa (talk) 16:01, 21 December 2009 (UTC)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3ASocial_technology
LikeLike