Educators are committing an “act of war” against America’s school children and intentionally dumbing down the nation, charges international journalist and educator Alex Newman.

Education bureaucrats – not ordinary teachers – are the criminals guilty of “treason,” he says.

“I hope this isn’t taken as an attack on teachers,” Newman said during a May 9 appearance on the radio program, “A Call to Rights.” “The teachers are just as much victims as the students here.”

Newman has co-authored a new book with Samuel Blumenfeld that’s taking Amazon by storm, “Crimes of the Educators,” which has surged to No. 379 on Amazon’s list of bestselling books overall.

In 1983, President Ronald Reagan created the National Commission on Excellence in Education to investigate poor educational outcomes in America. The commission proclaimed in its report, “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”

Newman and Blumenfeld accused the late American philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer John Dewey, of perpetrating the “act of war” on America’s kids.

“We argue that we should view it as an act of war,” Newman said. “Just because it wasn’t imposed by foreigners doesn’t make it any less serious. Dewey and his cohorts were trying to overthrow our system of government, our Constitution, our liberties, our God-given rights, and you know, that’s treasonous.”

Newman said Dewey viewed the educational system as the key to dumbing down the entire nation, thus paving the way for a socialist utopia.

“The key element of his strategy was to reduce the literacy of the American people, and he did that by replacing the study of phonics – systematic, intensive phonics – with this whole-word quackery, where they teach the kids to read English as if it were Chinese, so they look at the word as a picture, as a symbol, and then they’re supposed to associate that with the word,” Newman said. “That’s quackery!”

According to Newman, Dewey’s scheme has been implemented slowly, over many decades, so as to avoid a violent backlash from parents, teachers and taxpayers.

“This has been a very long and very slow process,” he said. “It’s taken over a century to get to the dire, horrifying results that we’re getting today, and it’s going to keep getting worse.”

In addition to the treason perpetrated by Dewey and his fellow progressives, Newman listed fraud and extortion as crimes of the educators. Those crimes have much to do with the “whole-word” method of teaching children to read. Newman and Blumenfeld maintain that the method confuses children, causing dyslexia and other reading disabilities.

The authors believe Common Core is fraudulent as well, and that the federal government is extorting taxpayers by funding it.

“If a private citizen were marketing some kind of product and said it did something and then it did the opposite, they would be taken to court for fraud,” Newman proclaimed. “They would be prosecuted, and so we argue that the same thing should be happening here with the education establishment.

“They’re telling us they’re taking hundreds of billions of our dollars every year, telling us they’re going to educate our children, and then they’re doing the exact opposite. They’re preventing them from learning how to read. They’re dumbing them down. They’re whitewashing the real history and teaching them a propaganda history.”

The full title of Common Core is “Common Core State Standards Initiative,” and Newman believes the name is a fraudulent and misleading.

“One of the really great frauds behind the whole Common Core movement is that this was some kind of state initiative,” Newman said. “Now, the National Governor’s Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers did play some nominal role in developing all this. But people need to understand these are not states – these are lobbying groups, these are trade groups based in Washington, D.C., funded by the federal government.”

Common Core testing is also federally funded, according to Newman. It draws from Race to the Top funds that originated with the federal stimulus.

“The notion that this is some kind of state initiative is ludicrous, and I’m frankly appalled that people are still trying to make that claim,” Newman said.

Newman claims many teachers recognize Common Core as a disaster, but their superiors are silencing them.

“I’ve talked to many teachers, and they are horrified by this Common Core thing,” Newman said. “Now, there are two things. One is a lot of them are being threatened. We have, here in Florida, some teachers who have been threatened with loss of their jobs if they speak out about Common Core.”

He added, “Second of all, they’re hearing from higher up the food chain that if Common Core leaves from the state, lots of jobs are going to be going. They’re saying federal funding is going to be cut, you’re all going to lose your jobs, so you’d better stand by this Common Core if you like your paycheck.”

Newman offered a simple plan for overcoming the educators’ crimes and improving the American education system: Return education policy to the local level, where parents and teachers will be free to try what actually works.

“The first thing I would do is shut down the entire department [of Education] and fire every bureaucrat in it, because the Department of Education has probably been the single worst thing to ever happen to education in this country,” he asserted.

With the Department of Education and Common Core out of the way, states would be free to experiment with their own policies, but Newman says he knows what works best – intensive, systematic phonics.

“The foundation of it all is high literacy,” he said. “We need to get back to phonics. Then children can acquire knowledge independently.

“They can read their Bibles. They can read their Constitutions. They can read their Declaration of Independence. They can read their history and their science, and we don’t have to rely on the government schools for all of our information and all of our knowledge.”

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