Some say there are no more heroes. Some say America is
devoid of the great minds who share the love of freedom and the courage of
conviction that were commonplace in our founding fathers. Some say
individuals don't count.
But, once in a while, in our value-deprived modern
times, there comes a lone rider, shouting a warning, alerting the unaware,
challenging the status quo, threatening sinister shadows that seek to do
harm.
Those who doubt the existence of heroes never met Anita
Hoge. Because of her, the "education reformers" can no longer
perpetrate their assault on America's children in a clandestine veil of
secrecy.
It all started in 1981 in the rural community of West
Alexander, Pennsylvania. Anita and her husband Garrett had deliberately
picked this small town atmosphere to assure their three young children the
wholesomeness such a place could offer, away from big city violence and
their notoriously bad and dangerous schools.
That bubble of security burst when Anita began to
notice strange activities unfolding in her children's classrooms. First,
their third grade daughter began to report on new games the teacher was
having them play in class. In one, the students drew little red tickets,
as in a card game, to decide which children would be ostracized and
ridiculed by the entire class that day. The purpose of the game was to
teach "compassion".
Homework assignments began to diminish. Rarely did the
parents see graded papers. Class lessons and exercises were printed on
mimeographed sheets, which were collected and kept by the teacher. They
weren't to be taken home.
Students now "role-played," even acting out
the part of prostitutes or drug addicts. Role-playing scripts consistently
depicted parents as overbearing, selfish, or punitive; never loving, kind
or gentle.
The Hoges' son became sullen, argumentative and angry.
His grades dropped. As he began to describe classroom activities and
films, it became clear to the Hoges, the children were literally being
terrified and terrorized by the messages they were being fed. But why
would the school do this to the children?
Anita began to pay visits to the school. She talked to
the teachers and the administrators. They offered no explanations for the
strange curriculum.
Finally, Anita's young son, Garrett, reported that he
had taken a "voluntary" assessment test that the parents knew
nothing about. The test asked little about academics, but contained a
large number of questions that pertained to personal and family business,
values and beliefs.
A few months later, while taking another such
"assessment" test, Garrett asked to be excused to go to the
bathroom. Instead, he called his mother and told her of the new test.
Anita asked Garrett to try to get the name of the test and bring it home
to her.
He did much more. He managed to copy down several of
the questions along with the name: the Educational Quality Assessment, put
out by the Pennsylvania Department of Education.
Anita went to the school the next day and demanded to
see the test. She was told it wasn't there. She asked to see the teacher
who had administered the test. She found that special "proctors"
had been brought onto the school from the State Department of Education to
administrator the test. Even teachers were barred from seeing it.
It was veiled in secrecy. Instead of answering her
questions, the school administrator reprimanded her son for revealing test
questions.
Anita discovered another parent who had been mistakenly
given a copy of the assessment test by a state senator. The senator was
later severely reprimanded by the education department for doing so. But
the parent had the copy and, finally, Anita was allowed to examine it.
That's when Anita began to realize what the government
was up to. From that moment, Anita began a journey into the very depths of
the education bureaucracy, first in Pennsylvania and eventually leading to
Washington, D.C. and the Federal Department of Education.
It was clear that the educrates were seeking to measure
the "attitudes" of the students, including personal feelings,
opinions, and home life. She sought to see more copies of tests that were
being given to her children but was barred every step of the way.
But nothing stopped Anita. Relentlessly she overcame
every obstacle.
Anita kept digging. She found a maze of secret tests
that are illegal for parents to see or obtain. Those tests measure
attitude changes of students. She found curriculum dictated by state
education departments, funded by the federal department of education. She
found that the curriculum was designed by psychologists to bring about the
desired behavior modification that the assessment tests were searching
for.
Anita found behavior modification pilot programs
quietly started in one part of the country and then slowly added to school
programs in another. Above all, the elusive connection to the whole web
was the assessment tests she had so innocently stumbled upon.
She did more than simply research the situation, she
took action. First she filed a complaint against the Pennsylvania
Department of Education calling for an end to the secret assessment tests.
In 1990, she was informed that she had won. But, soon she found that the
victory was really a ruse by the educrates to silence her. She went back
on the attack.
Through articles, lectures, public appearances and
seminars, she began to inform worried parents and teach them how to fight
back.
Most recently she has been instrumental in having
legislation drafted in Pennsylvania (H.B. 2105) that will eradicate OBE
from the classroom, stop secret assessment tests, protect the privacy
rights of parents and students, forbids using student Social Security
numbers as identifiers and restores local control of schools. This
landmark legislation will become the model for states throughout the
country and, hopefully, for the federal government, to finally end the
"reformists" tyranny over our children.
None of it would have been possible without the
relentless charge of Anita Hoge, who simply started out as a concerned
parent and, along the way, became a hero of freedom.
