I’ve been warning that the Education Freedom Account (EFA) program could eventually lead to a complete government take over of private and religious education in New Hampshire. HB1610 showed us that Democrats were even willing to go a step further and attempt to take over home-school education, too.

Many home-schoolers showed up to oppose HB1610, but relatively few private and religious school parents showed up to oppose this legislation. Do they not understand what this will look like if HB1610 is passed into law? Do they not understand the danger this is to all private and religious schools? I suspect many still don’t get it.

I also suspect that some administrators think that this legislation will not force their hand if it’s signed into law. Who cares if their students have to take the STATE standardized test? It will show how well their students are doing compared to students in the public schools. That’s wishful thinking.

HB1610 forces all students to take the STATE standardized test that is aligned to Common Core. That’s the first step. After that, they will then begin regulating these schools to remediate their students who are not scoring proficient on the assessment.

Academically that will mean that the private and religious schools will have to teach Common Core aligned curriculum. But it doesn’t stop there. It also means that the private and religious schools will have to teach beyond these academic flaws, and also teach the Common Core “skills” that are now included in the Common Core assessments. But what are the skills required of students subjected to Common Core?  GOOD QUESTION.

As you can see in this video, after abandoning No Child Left Behind and shifting to the Every Student Succeeds Act, assessments changed. This means that students aren’t only assessed on the flawed Common Core Standards but on their attitudes, values, and beliefs too. Those are now the SKILLS that will be assessed. That’s explained in this 15-minute video:

This is also reported in this study “Redefining learning through social-emotional learning,”  reported in the International journal of health sciences. In this study they report: (emphasis mine)

The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL, 2003) defines SEL as “the process by which children, adolescents, and adults acquire and apply the necessary knowledge and skills to understand and manage emotions, set goals, show empathy for others, establish positive relationships, and make responsible decisions”. Further, the definition of SEL during recent times incorporates an equality approach, hinting strong connections irrespective of “race, class, gender identity, sexual orientation, learning needs, and age”
(Srinivasan, 2019).

As SEL moves towards Transformative SEL, Social and Emotional Learning becomes more about social justice and political action, as we can see here in Second Step SEL.

This article explains how SEL will become Transformative SEL, and then emphasizes the trouble with Social and Emotional Learning:

Whether or not one chooses to call the set of related ideological impulses that CASEL has embraced “Critical Race Theory,” they are clearly not morally or politically neutral. Indeed, CASEL’s public documents and leadership statements suggest an open embrace of leveraging social and emotional learning toward political and ideological ends. In its “Roadmap to ReOpening,” CASEL defines “self-awareness” as “examining our implicit biases,” and defines “self-management” as “practicing anti-racism.” CASEL’s former CEO, Karen Niemi, declared “we believe that our work in Social and Emotional Learning must actively contribute to antiracism,” and that SEL can “help people move from anger, to agency, and then to action.” Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Anti-Racist, has declared that Critical Race Theory was foundational to his work. Work that openly calls for racial discrimination to redress past injustices: “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”

Given that CASEL sits atop the SEL ecosystem and has embraced a partisan political agenda, it is not unreasonable for parents to suspect that the burgeoning, near-billion-dollar sector is largely an ideological enterprise. Whether that is a reasonable assumption, or whether it paints with vastly too broad of a brush, is difficult to know for certain at this point. There are a variety of programs and vendors who take a variety of approaches. Overall assessment of the ideological character of SEL is further complicated by the presence of programs and practices that go beyond CASEL, in terms of ideology, that come with the SEL label. For example, Parents Defending Education has publicized an example of an elementary school teaching gender identity ideology under the name of “SEL.”

So what skills must a student posses in order to score proficient on the STATE standardized assessment? We can see what is expected in the Common Core State Standards for Math and English. But how will the STATE standardized assessment shift to grading “skills” in the future? What attitudes, values and beliefs must a student possess in order to pass the STATE standardized assessment?

SEL is to be incorporated throughout the curriculum in our public schools, which means public school students will eventually receive a healthy dose of social justice indoctrination. CASEL executives have stated quite clearly that their focus in transforming public education is no longer about academics–it’s about the schools raising your children with what they believe are the proper values, attitudes, and beliefs:

What happens when private, religious, and EFA students are forced to take these standardized assessments after the private and religious schools become reliant on public funds?

Even if just their EFA students have to take this assessment, it could have a big impact on how the religious and private schools teach their students. We saw religious schools in Ohio and Indiana begin to align to Common Core when their voucher students were forced to take the STATE Standardized assessment.

All of these changes come incrementally. First they force the assessment on students, then they force remediation if those students are not scoring proficient. Not only does that mean pushing Common Core on the religious and private schools, but  “skills” too.

Private and religious parents better get off the couch and start showing up to these hearings to oppose this government takeover of their schools. What families once escaped will creep into their private and religious schools if they do not act now.

Contact your state representatives and senator and tell them NO STATE standardized testing requirements for religious/private/EFA/ or home-school students. NO STATE Standardized testing requirements for our religious and private schools.

These schools are already required to test their students using an achievement test of their choice.  Those results are all that’s needed to prove that they are educating their students in the core academic subjects. There is no need to force the flawed STATE standardized assessment on any student, school, or home-school family.