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Schools choice is the primary beneficiary in the new budget cuts. there is more emphasis on charter schools and because of this some teachers and people believe that the budget cuts will hurt our public schools. The new budge for example, states that “Decades of investments and billions of dollars in spending have shown that an increase in funding does not guarantee high-quality education.” Does cutting the spending in programs designed for learning hurt our students

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If a president's budget proposal is a roadmap for the commander-in-chief's priorities, the 2019 fiscal plan released Monday spells out some clear winners and losers in education.

While the budget overall proposes spending increases for key Trump campaign promises, such as expanding the military and immigration enforcement, the president's proposal looks to slash the Education Department's budget by more than 5 percent, cutting back the agency's $63.2 billion in discretionary funding by $3.6 billion. The Trump administration initially sought much steeper cuts - totaling $8 billion - but the administration released an addendum after Congress reached a two-year spending deal last week.

School choice proponents are the clear winner in Trump's 2019 spending plan, which aims to invest $1 billion in "opportunity grants" to create a private school voucher program. The request also includes $500 million in charter school funding, a $160 million increase in the federal government's current investment in the schools. STEM education would also get a boost from the budget proposal, which includes $200 million in grants for science, technology, engineering, and math programs.

"Quality education exists when parents have a voice in choosing their child's K-12 schools and students have the tools they need to succeed," the budget states. "Decades of investments and billions of dollars in spending have shown that an increase in funding does not guarantee high-quality education."

More broadly, however, the proposal looks to scale back federal investment in schools. Although the budget puts an emphasis on education to combat the opioid epidemic, the school climate grant program used as a vehicle to achieve those efforts is slashed from $67.5 million to $43 million.

Overall, the proposed cuts announced Monday are dwarfed in comparison to the president's goals last year, when Trump proposed gutting the Education Department by $9.2 billion. Congress, however, largely ignored his requests. Yet the budget offers insight into the president's thinking.

The plan released Monday would scale back, eliminate, or streamline 39 programs the administration says duplicate other programs, are ineffective, or would be "more appropriately supported" by state, local, or private funds. Of those, 29 would be eliminated outright. From the list of programs Trump hopes to scrap altogether, here are the top 10, based on budget amount, along with the administration's justification for the cuts:

1. Supporting Effective Instruction States Grants - $2,055,800,000

The program provides professional development opportunities to teachers and works to reduce class sizes. The program, the proposal argues, is "largely duplicative," since other federal funds can be used on professional development.

2. 21st Century Community Learning Centers - $1,191,700,000

This federal grant supports before-school, after-school, and summer school programs for nearly 2 million students. However, to justify the program's elimination, the budget says it struggles to improve student achievement since "just two-fifths of program participants attend on a regular basis."

3. Federal Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants - $733,100,000

This program allows higher education institutions to provide students need-based aid. The Trump administration argues the program is a duplicate to Pell Grants and "its allocation formula is not targeted efficiently."

4. Student Support and Academic Enrichment Grants - $400,000,000

This federal block grant helps states provide a well-rounded education to students by improving school conditions and the use of technology. But the initiatives authorized under the program, the administration argues, "generally can be supported with funds from other sources," such as Title I grants.

5. Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs - $339,800,000

Commonly known as GEAR UP, the program helps low-income K-12 students prepare for college. The program, the administration argues, could be covered by federal TRIO programs, which support low-income, first-generation, or disabled college students, or through Title I grants.

6. Teacher and School Leader Incentive Grants - $200,000,000

This program provides funding for projects that develop performance-based pay in low-income schools, but the initiative, the budget proposal says, "has delivered limited evidence of improved teaching or learning."

7. Comprehensive Literacy Development Grants - $190,000,000

This program, which works to improve literacy instruction, "has limited impact," according to the budget proposal, and its activities could be supported by Title I.

8. Strengthening Institutions - $86,500,000

This program helps higher education institutions become self-sufficient but, according to the budget proposal, "duplicates activities that may be supported with other federal funds."

9. Promise Neighborhoods - $73,300,000

The program supports local partnerships to implement neighborhood-based plans to address the educational, health, and social service needs of low-income families. But previous recipients, according to the budget proposal, "have struggled to effectively implement all program components, improve outcomes across the broad range of program goals, and build sufficient capacity to maintain program beyond the initial 5-year grant period."

10. Impact Aid Payments for Federal Property - $68,800,000

This program provides assistance to local school districts that have lost a portion of their local tax base due to federal government land ownership. But the budget proposal argues that most districts have received payments for 40 years or more - "sufficient time to adjust to the removal of federal property from their tax rolls."

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By the Numbers: President Trump's 10 Biggest Proposed Cuts to U.S. Education, Ranked

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If a president's budget proposal is a roadmap for the commander-in-chief's priorities, the 2019 fiscal plan released Monday spells out some clear winners and losers in education. While the budget overall proposes spending increases for key Trump campaign promises, such as expanding the military and immigration enforcement, the president's proposal looks to slash the Education [...]

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The purpose of the teacher evaluations is to ensure our students are getting the best education from the best teachers. The first cartoon in this topic shows that there are many variables that come with teaching and getting a good evaluation based on your teaching. what is really controversial about these evaluations is that the people evaluating you or creating the evaluations are not educators and have not set foot in a long time. further more, because of prior legislation, teacher reputation has become a reflection of test scores. in which case if students perform poorly in their tests, then teachers are labeled as ineffective teachers.

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Charlotte Danielson just might be the world's top guru on teacher evaluation. The economist-turned-teacher, who once taught in Princeton and West Windsor, is founder and president of the Danielson Group, a Princeton-based consultancy. Her model for evaluating teachers has been adopted in many states, including Arkansas, Delaware, Idaho, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Danielson advises many state education departments, including New Jersey's, and consults all over the world. The source of her renown is a 1996 book, Enhancing Professional Practice: A Framework for Teaching (ASCD), which demystified teaching by defining it through four domains of professional responsibility, with components such as "managing student behavior" and "engaging students in learning." It is widely used as a guide for evaluating teachers in New Jersey.

Q. Is teaching an art or science? How hard is it?

A. I would say it's a little both. Teaching is a complex performance. And it's very hard, so hard it's never perfect.

Q. Can teachers really be evaluated with a standard measure?

A. Yes. But you have to make sure that the people who do the judging are qualified. You have to agree on what quality is, and you have to train people. Evaluations are high stakes, and they must be defensible.

Q. Is that proof that teachers who score well, under your criteria, actually see tangible gains in student achievement?

A. Yes. Two very large studies have demonstrated that.

Q. What do you think about assessing individual teachers by looking at their students' test scores?

A. It is very dicey. Nobody on the planet has figured out how to do this. The assessments themselves aren't very good, and there are other problems. Let's say I teach fourth grade. My kids score very well in reading. I'm happy, my principal's happy. But you know there's also a reading teacher in the building, so there's no way to make sure I did it.

Q. Are teachers right in saying forces outside their control impede student learning?

A. It's the truth. Some people choose to ignore it, but parental support and general cultural support matter hugely. There are whole populations of kids who don't have that.

Q. Do you think the current movement to reform teacher evaluation will succeed?

A. I do think there's a chance. But education is a very faddish profession. Things come and go. Let's suppose, though, that we become really good at labeling teachers, and we do it accurately. I worry that, 10 years from now, we'll find kids aren't learning any better. The public could be forgiven for asking what we spent the money on. The aim has to be about helping teachers get better, not labeling them.

Q. In contemporary American society, there's a lot of negative talk about teachers. Some seem to have lost respect for the profession. Why?

A. That I cannot answer. I do regret it. In countries that do better than we do in international assessments, it's a very respected profession.
Click here to read about how NJ's teachers are evaluated.
Click here to leave a comment

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Charlotte Danielson, An Expert On Teachers Evaluation, Discusses The Merits Of The Process

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Charlotte Danielson just might be the world's top guru on teacher evaluation. The economist-turned-teacher, who once taught in Princeton and West Windsor, is founder and president of the Danielson Group, a Princeton-based consultancy. Her model for evaluating teachers has been adopted in many states, including Arkansas, Delaware, Idaho, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

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Over the past 10 years school shootings have gone up and with them the demand for higher security at public schools. this cartoon depicts the issue of paying for security in a school with education funding. While having armed guards at schools are opposed by many, The desire for armed guards has gone up. “It sends the signal that the school is being watched and that the care and supervision of children is an important priority,” said one of the directors of national school safety council. to cover the estimated 132,000 public and private schools in the US it would cost approximately $63 billion  for six officers at every school.
https://wtop.com/education/2018/03/study-armed-security-officers-are-on-the-rise-in-us-schools/

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Sitting with students and parents on Wednesday - including some students who were at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School last week when a shooter killed 17 people - President Trump explored possible ways in which mass shooting incidents at schools could be prevented.

Among them? Arming teachers.

"A lot of people are talking about it - it's certainly a point that we'll discuss," Trump said. "But concealed-carry for teachers and for people of talent - of that type of talent - so let's say you had 20 percent of your teaching force. Because that's pretty much the number, and you said it - an attack has lasted, on average, about three minutes. It takes five to eight minutes for responders - for the police to come in. So the attack is over. If you had a teacher with - who was adept at firearms, they could very well end the attack very quickly."

In the abstract, adding armed staff to schools does seem as if it could help curtail mass shooting incidents. Not prevent them, mind you; even Trump's aim in that quote is ending mass shootings faster, not preventing them. That difference echoes a report prepared by the National School Shield Task Force in 2013. That document, funded by the National Rifle Association, similarly argued that incidents in which other armed individuals had been able to confront school shooters resulted in fewer deaths.

It's worth considering, though, what Trump is proposing. What does it mean in economic terms for one out of every five teachers to be prepared to engage with an armed individual intent on murdering students at a school? Or, if you prefer, a proposal from former House speaker Newt Gingrich to hire "six to eight" guards to patrol every school. What's the tab for that?

A fifth of teachers

Data from the Department of Education indicates there are an estimated 3.1 million public school and 400,000 private-school teachers in the United States. In total, there are about 3.6 million teachers.

One-fifth of that total is 718,000 - a bit fewer than the number of people in the Army and the Navy combined as of last December. We would essentially be adding 50 percent to the size of the military by mandating that nearly three-quarters of a million people be trained and prepared to take up arms to defend civilians.

The first cost that needs to be considered is training. What sort of training would be required isn't clear. Do we want to simply teach the teachers how to target an individual and fire a weapon? Or do we want something more expansive?

Let's say we want the bare minimum, just enough to pass the safety requirement for gun ownership. In Maryland, there's a company that will charge you $100 for that training. The cost, then, would be about $71.8 million for all of our teachers.

There are groups that offer training specifically for teachers facing active-shooter scenarios. One is the Ohio-based Faculty/Administrator Safety Training & Emergency Response program (FASTER) run by the Buckeye Firearms Foundation. Its program is free for teachers, funded by corporate and individual donors. It includes 26 hours of training over three days and purports to "allow teachers, administrators, and other personnel on-site to stop school violence rapidly and render medical aid immediately."

In an email to The Washington Post, the group's program director, Joe Eaton, said that the cost of the training is about $1,000 per trainee. It covers more than just a scenario in which a shooter is on campus, mind you, but that is part of the program.

That more robust training means that the cost for our 718,000 teachers spikes to $718 million. There would almost certainly be some efficiencies of scale that would come into play here - systems would be developed to train teachers quickly and at less cost - but the figure would still likely run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Assuming that this particular school supply is covered by districts, we need to account for the cost of the firearms, as well.

Let's consider the Glock G17, which the manufacturer touts as the world's most popular pistol. It runs $500 apiece, meaning that our price tag for arming our teachers just went up by $359 million. Maybe Glock, too, would give the Department of Education a discount, perhaps cutting the price in half. That changes the total to $180 million.

Our grand total? If we assume the cheapest training and the discounted Glock, we're at $251 million to arm 718,000 teachers. If we instead assume the full-price, more expansive training and the full-price firearm, the tab creeps past $1 billion.
Update: At about the same time this article was published, Trump took to Twitter to explain his comments. If the schools are providing only the guns and not the training, the costs obviously come down - though it seems likely that you would need to either recruit a lot more military veterans to teach or train a lot more teachers to shoot in order to reach Trump's 20 percent density goal. It's also worth noting that "giving teachers concealed guns" doesn't seem to conflict with "give teachers guns."
Six to eight guards

What about Gingrich's proposal? How much would that cost?

As of the 2013-2014 school year, there were about 132,000 public and private schools in the United States, including about 24,000 public high schools. Six to eight guards in those schools means between 791,000 and 1 million guards in place - a bit lower than the size of the armed forces.

To figure out the cost of guarding those schools, we need to know how much those positions would cost. A 2013 analysis of adding armed guards to schools completed by professor Ned Hill of Cleveland State University estimated that school resource officers would run between $75,000 and $97,000 annually. That's about $80,000 to $103,000 today.

The cost of those officers, then, would run between $63 billion (six guards per school at $80,000 a year) and $109 billion (eight guards at $103,000).

Let's assume, though, that we don't need as many guards in non-high schools. Still some, of course; since 2000 there have been at least 61 shootings at elementary and middle schools in the United States in addition to at least 68 shootings at high schools. If we weight the number of guards needed toward older students, we need between 367,000 and 490,000 guards and the range of costs ends up between $29 billion and a bit more than $50 billion.

Hill's analysis, incidentally, estimated that fewer guards were needed - about 156,000 total - and calculated a price tag of between $12 billion and $15 billion.

Annually.

Other considerations

This is also not a comprehensive look at the costs involved. There's ammunition, for example, and the costs of annual training programs or hiring new teachers and guards.

And, of course, there's insurance. Insurance rates increase when armed guards are hired. Why? In part because the risks of accidents also increase.

"When insurers evaluate the use of armed officers, they quite often see risks outweigh the benefits for the average company or organization," Tory Brownyard wrote for Security magazine in 2013, "risks that have a significant impact on both the availability and cost of insurance coverage." Some insurers recommend against armed guards entirely.

The added cost is hard to estimate without knowing what schools currently pay, but the increase would likely not be minimal.

What none of the figures above include is the psychological cost of arming teachers. After Trump's statement was reported, some weighed in on social media.

Certainly some teachers would embrace the idea of arming and preparing themselves - FASTER has a steady stream of clients - but many wouldn't. Others noted that schools are already strapped for resources, and questioned whether adding firearms and training to the mix made sense.

Remember: These costs would ultimately trickle down to taxpayers. About 100 million taxable returns were filed with the IRS for the 2015 fiscal year, 41.5 million of which were from married couples filing jointly. This is a rough division, but it suggests that the price of arming teachers would cost 121 million taxpayers between $2 and $9 to train and arm a fifth of the America's teachers (excluding the other costs above) or between $96 and $900 annually for six to eight armed guards to be stationed in schools.

To prevent what, despite the attention these tragedies receive, are still happily rare incidents.
This article was corrected with the proper figures for the number of teachers.

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Analysis | The economics of arming America's schools

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Sitting with students and parents on Wednesday - including some students who were at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School last week when a shooter killed 17 people - President Trump explored possible ways in which mass shooting incidents at schools could be prevented. Among them? Arming teachers.

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Climate Change Education Scares Children

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Climate Change Education Scares Children

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Since the 80s there has been a number of pushes to promote education in climate change. The post that belongs with this cartoon specifies a book written about the scare approach to teaching about controversial topics. some say this is still the case today as displayed by this cartoon. Better ways to teach such topic would be recommended specially since there are representatives in our government that deny climate change.

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Last update: 30 November 2018
I want to provide links to reports, comments, and discussions of children being frightened by what they have been told about climate change or how they have been told it.

The problem of deliberately targeting the very young using scare stories to win their attention and attract them to political causes or even actions was described in the context of many eco-scares by Herbert London in 1984, in his book ' Why Are They Lying to Our Children'. Climate scares get a mention there, but since then we have seen many quite outrageous efforts by climate activists to, in Lomberg's words, scare ' our kids silly'. He also noted (this is 2009): 'We see the same pattern in the United Kingdom, where a survey showed that half of young children aged between seven and 11 are anxious about the effects of global warming, often losing sleep because of their concern. This is grotesquely harmful. And let us be honest. This scare was intended. Children believe that global warming will destroy the planet before they grow up because adults are telling them that .'

There is some sign that the disgraceful targeting may become less common, now that some researchers have found (2014) that it does not help 'the cause': 'Schneiderian Scenarios No Longer Cool', in other words. Shame on them all. They will look for other ways to promote their interests. As we noted in 'Alarmist claims about the impact of global warming are contributing to a loss of trust in climate scientists, an inquiry has found. Apocalyptic language has been used about greenhouse gas emissions as "a deliberate strategy by some to engage public interest". http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/environment/article4128107.ece) The report from UCL is available as a pdf here: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/public-policy/Policy_Commissions/Communication-climate-science/Communication-climate-science-report/TIME_FOR_CHANGE_Final_Proof.pdf 'Climate Control' (2014) '.. the discovery that fear is a poor means of persuasion seems only to have engendered a determination amongst activist teachers to find more insidious ways to recruit children to their cause' However, trying to make people reduce emissions by frightening them has "harmful consequences" because they often respond suspiciously or decide the issue is "too scary to think about". The inquiry, by a team of senior scientists from a range of disciplines, was commissioned by University College London to find better ways of informing the public about climate science.' (

General

#2004 This is one way the scaremongering can spread:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/3339550/Charities-spread-scare-stories-on-climate-change-to-boost-public-donations.html#

The newspaper headline is derived from this report (pdf) from researchers at the University of Oxford, and the newspaper article ends with quoting a glib remark: 'Bryony Worthington, a climate campaigner for Friends of the Earth, said: "The biodiversity research group cannot really claim that it constituted crying wolf, as there is potential for the worst-case scenarios to be realised." ' So, by this logic, since the crowded theatre has the potential for it, shouting 'Fire!' is the thing to do. She went on to be the main labouring wordsmith in the putting together of the UK's Climate Change Act passed in 2008.

#2006. A report on UN plans to scare children for political purposes:

' Finally, the United Nations Environmental Programme is spending our money to come out with scary children's fairy tales about global warming. Sedena, the Mother of the Sea, is featured in the UN Environmental Programme's latest children's book on global warming entitled "Tore and the Town on Thin Ice". This book tells the story of a young boy named Tore who lives in a village in the Arctic and is upset when he loses a dog sled race. The Mother of the Sea appears in Tore's dream and informs him that the thinning ice, which caused his loss in the dog sled race, was due to man-made global warming.

But that is nothing compared to what it is doing to the Mother of the Sea's own dominion and to all living creatures. She sends an owl, a polar bear, and a whale to scare poor Tore into thinking that they will become extinct during his lifetime and that "our world is melting" from climate changes, mostly caused by those bad people in "rich countries" who are spewing gases in the air from their "huge cars", air conditioners and the like. In the words of the whale, children like Tore should "get good and angry". The book ends with a so-called "facts" section, blaming climate change on the "Industrial Revolution in Europe and North America" and singling out the United States in particular for its contribution to the production of "carbon dioxide added by humans." It claims that "climate change will hit the poorer countries hardest" while at the same time saying that New York along with other coastal areas "could disappear beneath the waves."

It seems that scaring children is right up there in the UN toolbox to fix global warming ...'

#2006 General argument as to why climate alarmism in schools could be harmful for a long time: 'Collectively, anxiety conditions are the most common mental disorders in children. Moreover, they often persist throughout life, causing significant distress and interfering significantly with social life and achievement both during the child's formative years and later in adulthood. Early intervention to prevent or treat anxiety in childhood has the potential to avert some of these debilitating consequences.'
Quote is from article by Kathy Griffiths
Centre for Mental Health Research, Australian National University, Canberra ACT
http://hsr.e-contentmanagement.com/archives/vol/17/issue/1/review/485/the-worry-busters-program-an-anxiety

#2007 A postgraduate student in Oxford gets it 'This should be a wake-up call for all the purveyors of the 'politics of fear'. Children are, naturally, relatively powerless and likely to feel overwhelmed by the challenges facing mankind. But as adults, we should have a greater sense of our own collective power to master problems and build better societies. Not only does jumping from one panic to another, each with disastrous consequences - mobile phone radiation, BSE, SARS, crime, paedophilia, terrorism, bird flu, global warming - diminish our own sense of agency, by turning childhood dreams of utopia into nightmarish visions of the future it is teaching the citizens of the future all the wrong lessons.'
Turning Children Green with Fear : http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/2950/

#2007 More anecdotal evidence: 'In one online discussion of the problem, Lisa from Perth in Scotland reports that her kids are so worried about climate change that they have even asked her if she still wants to be cremated.' Quote from above link: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/2950/

#2007 Why do campaigners target children with fearful tales? Here is a post on an Australian site about early childhood which addresses the question 'Why do young children need to know about climate change?'. I include it here as a source of insight into the mentality and some of the arguments used: http://www.earlychildhoodaustralia.org.au/resource_themes/sustainability_global_warming_and_climate_change/why_do_young_children_need_to_know_about_climate_change.html
Extract'With children over three, adults can begin to discuss the reasons these practices are needed. This encourages deeper learning, where children become critical thinkers, helping them to understand the impact that our actions have on the planet'
#2007 A UK study of primary school children found extensive evidence in its 'soundings' of children scared about climate change: The soundings programme as a whole was pervaded by a sense of deep pessimism about the future, to which children themselves were not immune. Many expressed concern about climate change, global warming and pollution,...' ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/12_10_2007primary.pdf)
But this was not reflected in the final report, whose author instead chose to assert that such fears were alleviated in schools where efforts were made to get children to do things: 'On the other hand, two major and more positive findings from our community soundings study are definitely worth repeating here. First, for many children and families it is the schools which provide the security, support, sense of purpose, positive values and sense of community which may be in decline outside the school gates. Second, pessimism turned to hope when witnesses felt they had the power to act. So, for example, the children who were most confident that climate change would not overwhelm them were those whose primary schools had decided to replace unfocused fear by factual information and practical strategies for energy reduction and sustainable living. As we said at the time, there's an important lesson here, for Government as well as for schools.' ( http://www.robinalexander.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Childhood-lecture-2.pdf). Note the sinister pushing of getting schools to come between parents and children with 'strategies for energy reduction and sustainable living'.

#2008 A paper in a mental health journal 'Hope, despair and transformation: Climate change and the promotion of mental health and wellbeing', one that takes the alarm over climate at face value (does such naivity occur over other speculations?). Extract:
'It is likely that many children are aware of the threat of climate change. However, it is also quite likely that they are confused about the facts and the magnitude of the threat they personally face, and might feel anxious, concerned or confused. Worries and anxieties about these threats can become difficult for children of all ages to deal with.'
http://www.ijmhs.com/content/2/1/13

#2008 Pre-traumatic stress disorder. Something being inflicted every day on children around the world about climate change? "The triple-threat posed by today's impending energy, climate and financial crises can steal our conception of the future, rob us of who we believe we are, and threaten our sense of normalcy. The result is an eco-anxiety that, as Richard Heinberg has pointed out, might best be defined as a pre-traumatic stress syndrome." http://eco-anxiety.blogspot.co.uk/2008/04/eco-anxiety-pre-traumatic-stress.html
#2008 Psychiatrist promotes distress 'for a given audience' as his contribution to spreading the climate scaremongering:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcWn3b3h3sQ
Hat-tip Ben Pile (2018): https://cliscep.com/2018/01/31/green-blob-gravy-train-at-pidcock-corner/#comment-21909

#2009 A somewhat similar-looking paper here: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/news_details.php?news_id=1240&year=2009 Extract: ' The knowledge of man-made climate change could in itself have adverse effects on individual psychological well-being.'

#2009 An article by Lomborg contains reports of frightened children, and begins with this paragraph:
'The continuous presentation of scary stories about global warming in the popular media makes us unnecessarily frightened. Even worse, it terrifies our kids.'
See: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2009/jun/15/climate-change-children

# This site ( http://www.breadandbutterscience.com/LEM.htm )has materials on various environmental false alarms and scares, including a subsection entitled
Prolonged Psychological Fear Based on Unfounded/Distorted Claims

# The Global Warming Science (Appinsys) site has relevant materials in its 'Fear' page: http://www.appinsys.com/globalwarming/Fear.htm

# The pyschology page of that site is also relevant, since as far as I can see, pyschologists and their organisations have collaborated with rather than resisted the climate scaremongering, as have other professions such as PR agencies: http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/AGW_Psychology.htm

'So, if the climate scare-mongers can't frighten the adults, the next logical step is to heap angst on their children who then frighten (or better, pester) the adults into action.'

#2011 Academic study of anxiety, depression etc caused by climate alarmism: 'The two Queensland University of Technology investigators say their results reveal that the public is "becoming increasingly concerned about climate change" and that there is a relationship between this concern and symptoms that are "indicative of depression, anxiety and stress." They say that individuals "are finding information about climate change increasingly difficult to cope with, and the resulting negative thoughts and feelings are contributing to the development and maintenance of clinical levels of depressive and anxious symptoms." They also note that the majority of the study participants "were more concerned about climate change now than they were three, five and ten years ago, reflecting the increasing concern shown in the media and the more commonly used discourses of our time relating to fear, danger and catastrophe." In addition, they report that "all ages felt equally as helpless, hopeless and powerless," and that "greater overall distress in the younger age groups may reflect the increasing tendency to teach climate change themes in school curriculae." '
http://nipccreport.org/articles/2011/jul/12jul2011a1.html

#2011 'Got kids? Watched as they've been indoctrinated - sorry, I mean educated - about global warming over the last decade? Then you'll know what I mean. They come home from school moodily depressed about the future of our planet and, of course, what that means for their own lives. What's the point? We're all doomed! Why study? Why bother getting an education? It's futile. Sea levels are rising. Temperatures are soaring. Soon we'll all be living in a polluted hell-hole constantly battling the equivalent of the Queensland floods or the Victorian bushfires year upon year. And you want me to waste what precious time I have left studying accountancy?
It's called nihilism, and it's even more terrifying to witness in your teenage children than hickeys, drunkenness, truancy, insolence, idleness, bad marks or bullying. Nihilism, or the conviction that life on Earth is totally pointless, saps the young of their energy, their ambition, and their will to strive, struggle and triumph.' Extract from an online article by Rowan Dean, 17 August 2011.
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/2843812.html

#2012 Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Not specifically about children, but maybe relevant, is this study of 50 patients with OCD. 28 of them linked their actions to their anxieties about 'climate change'.

#2012 Ubiquitous fear. A review of a new book on fear of chemicals, but which seems to have relevance for climate scares. Reviewer concludes 'Given all that, I fundamentally agree with Entine and the Council's position. Too much junk science is pushed by activists and attorneys. Too many journalists and now bloggers and commenters are eager to scare the beJesus out of us in order to attract eyeballs and be seen as crusaders. Too many politicians care little about the science and what is real in their eagerness to be seen as the white knights out to save us all. Too many educators and academic scientists pass on their 1960s and 1970s values of distrust. The result is a world filled with false fears. It is endemic in our youth in particular. It is evident in far too many anonymous comments on the web. There is outrage, fear and mistrust that is stoked by too many institutions and fear mongers who have much to gain.'

#2012 A committed collaborator in climate scaremongering, the Washington Post carries a report on a survey suggesting young people are less concerned about the environment than the scaremongers (which seems to include most of the political class) would really like. I suspect it is a defensive alienation due to the relentless junk they and their teachers have been exposed to over the past 40 years beginning with Carson, then Ehrlich, Limits to Growth, and more recently the CO2 Alarm Bandwagon - the biggest junk and junket of all of them. Extract:
' CHICAGO - They have a reputation for being environmentally minded do-gooders. But an academic analysis of surveys spanning more than 40 years has found that today's young Americans are less interested in the environment and in conserving resources - and often less civic-minded overall - than their elders were when they were young.
The findings go against the widespread belief that environmental issues have hit home with today's young adults, known as Millennials, who have grown up amid climate change discussion and the mantra "reduce, reuse, recycle." The environment is often listed among top concerns of young voters.
"I was shocked," said Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University who is one of the study's authors. "We have the perception that we're getting through to people. But at least compared to previous eras, we're not."
This study, published online this month in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, looked at the life goals, concern for others and civic orientation of three young generations - baby boomers, Generation X and Millennials.
Based on two long-standing national surveys of high school seniors and college freshmen, Twenge and her colleagues found a decline over the past four decades in young people's trust in others, their interest in government and the time they said they spent thinking about social problems.'

#2012 A strong appeal for an end of climate scaremongering: http://endthelie.com/2012/12/10/a-clockwork-green-terrorizing-children-using-climate-change

#2012 (year published on YouTube). A compilation of clips about climate which begins with statements from frightened children (from Not Evil Just Wrong) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keDtanExdrc

#2013 From what seems to be an obscure teacher-training college in Boston, here is an appeal for an increase in climate scaremongering: http://wheelockglobalcauses.org/health-care/global-warming-time-to-scare-people/

#2014 A piece on a 2012 report which seems inclined to throw oil on the fire rather than challenge the scaremongering around climate - the truth of which is just taken for granted. Irresponsible or what? "The report compared what children may be feeling today to the distress suffered by American and Russian children over the threat of the nuclear bomb in the 1950s during the Cold War era, saying that climate change could have the same destructive impact. "Some children are already anxious about global warming and begin to obsess, understandably, about the future, unmoved by the small reassurances adults may attempt to put forth," the report said."

#2014 Googling for 'Images of Children of the Climate Scare' gave me these results.

#2014 ' Honey, You're Scaring the Kids' A long, and thoughtful article about deliberate and accidental scaring of children on topical issues, most notably atomic bomb topics from the 1950s onwards. The author moves on to climate change towards the end of her article, and has this to say about this blog and yours truly:

' Denier "JS," who pseudonymously blogs for the site Climate Lessons, has compiled a massive list of international examples, as reported in the media, of children's climate fears. In JS's cosmology, innocent children's mental states are threatened by climate "alarmists'" overreach, and long-suffering parents are left to pick up the pieces.'

What she thinks I 'deny' is not stated. Apart from this lapse from grace, the article is well worth reading.

Child psychiatrists and other mental health experts say they are seeing an increase in anxiety among today's youth over the constant doom-and-gloom atmosphere they are presented regarding so-called global warming/climate change.' Some of these 'experts', rather than attack the root cause of the relentless alarmism, then suggest the youth should make trivial adjustments to their daily lives in order to enjoy the illusion of 'making a difference'. http://www.naturalnews.com/045007_doomsday_talk_climate_change_anxiety.html#

#2015 A little light amidst the gloom. Here is an 18 year old who has

clearly had enough of the climate alarmism he will have been exposed to for his entire life. ' Why do we place so much trust in the climate scientists and their Doomsday predictions? TV's Mythbusters would do a better job of getting the global warming facts straight.'

'We spoke with young people from around the world about why it's hard for their peers to care about the environment, how they reconcile their fears about the future, what made them start caring, and the little things that give them hope.' Such a waste.

#2016 ' Young people are particularly at risk from this epidemic of fear. They are the first generation raised from cradle to grave on a constant diet of global warming fears.

And they are afraid. Very afraid.

A recent study finds millennials are more anxious and depressed than any generation since measurements began in the 1930s. They are being force fed lies. And so we find in the first quarter of the twenty-first century we live in a world where many people find it difficult to disentangle reality from fantasy. Could constant cries of environmental disaster blasted into their ears play a role?'

Much general good sense about avoiding panic when it comes to CO2.

'Then I went into depression. My social life turned into fits and spurts of intense engagement followed by equally intense withdrawal. I was deeply afraid of telling even the people closest to me what I knew and why I was so scared. I couldn't sleep. The crying fits continued. They didn't become more predictable.'

How many more like this poor woman are out there?

#2008 'Dr Joshua Wolf and Dr Robert Salo, of the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne, treated a 17-year-old patient who believed that "due to climate change, his own water consumption could lead within days to the deaths of millions of people." An extreme case, but as one of the doctors treating his illness noted "I wouldn't be surprised if other patients also have similar worries because [climate change] has become a very common preoccupation."

' But experts have called for caution in teaching children about climate change because of the potential for fear, anxiety, frustration, anger and despair at catastrophic events.'

# 2009. Psychiatric disorders and climate alarmism in the young:
'Last year, an anxious, depressed 17-year-old boy was admitted to the psychiatric unit at the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne. He was refusing to drink water. Worried about drought related to climate change, the young man was convinced that if he drank, millions of people would die. The Australian doctors wrote the case up as the first known instance of "climate change delusion."
Robert Salo, the psychiatrist who runs the inpatient unit where the boy was treated, has now seen several more patients with psychosis or anxiety disorders focused on climate change, as well as children who are having nightmares about global-warming-related natural disasters.'
See: http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/green/articles/2009/02/09/climate_change_takes_a_mental_toll/
And: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/07/09/psychiatrists-have-detected-the-first-case-of-climate-change-delusion/

#2009. More examples reported from Australia in this newspaper article, which includes this paragraph:
'But experts have called for caution in teaching children about climate change because of the potential for fear, anxiety, frustration, anger and despair at catastrophic events.'
'Schoolchildren raised running out of drinking water, rising sea levels and the extinction of polar bears in a survey on their views last year.
"Children of that age should not be thinking the world is coming to an end," Sydney father-of-three Andrew Potter, 35, said.
"It is a form of propaganda."

See: http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/preschool-greenwash-scaring-children/story-e6freuy9-1225791148619

#2009 Read this 'letter to a child' by a demented academic called Hamilton, confusingly entitled 'a letter to your father' as a particularly reprehensible example of scaremongering and propagandising aimed at the young: http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/28372.html Many comments are, thank goodness, quite scathing. For example from 'wombat': 'Can I get an AVO to keep this creepy guy at least 100 metres from my kids' school and playground?'

# 2010. University of Western Australia

An example of poor reasoning skills in an academic psychologist exercised by CO2 in the air:

2010. Here is a climate activist who pauses to reflect after scaring at least one child with her climate materials:

"I finish up with my workshop and the students start trickling away to lunch. One boy hangs back, and raises his hand. He asks his question in a low voice, not wanting others to hear:
'What's actually going to happen with climate change? Is the world just going to burn up?'
For a moment the rawness of his fear renders me speechless. There is no way for me to instantly communicate what I need to; that the future he faces is uncertain, but within that uncertainty there is the possibility of a more just and sustainable world."
Now she doesn't for a moment question what she is doing or the flimsy basis for it in science, nor does she wonder long about the harm she is doing to children. Instead she reverts back to propaganda mode, and with an astonishing, but sadly all too common, degree of assurance, spells out that more climate indoctrination is required in the curriculum, under the guise of 'sustainability' of course. She, the writer, is a victim of the CO2 scam, and she is setting out to create more by targeting the young.
Original report here: http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/todays-students-face-tomorrows-climate-problems-20100305-pn2e.html

#2010 ' Climate change related obsessions and/or compulsions were identified in 28% of patients presenting with obsessive compulsive disorder. Their obsessions included leaving taps on and wasting water, leaving lights on and wasting electricity, pets dying of thirst, leaving the stove on and wasting gas as well as obsessions that global warming had contributed to house floors cracking, pipes leaking, roof problems and white ants eating the house.'

Report on research by Mairwen Jones of the University of Sydney

#2011 ' Psychologists and responsible scientists warn that the resource material provided by the Federal Government to promote the cult amongst primary school teachers and students causes "unnecessary anxiety and endangers children's mental health", and that "to put all of this before our children ... is one of the most appalling things we can do to children." They say that far too much time is being spent in school classrooms "presenting scary scenarios" of eco-apocalypticism to students..'

#2011 'PRIMARY school children are being terrified by lessons claiming climate change will bring "death, injury and destruction" to the world unless they take action.'

#2011 ' Australian children terrified by 'doomsday' climate change lessons'

'"(Children) feel incredibly despondent and helpless in the face of all this negative information," she said. "To put all of this before our children ... is one of the most appalling things we can do to (them).'

#2011 Sydney school play. Not clear if the children were scared by this play, but it was clearly intended to scare both them and their parents http://www.nocarbontax.com.au/2011/08/school-play-preaches-climate-catastrophism-to-our-young/ (hat-tip 28 Feb 2012, Jo Nova) '"This was a deliberate attempt to link global warming alarmism to unrelated geological catastrophes. Presenting our children with such inaccurate information through subtle innuendo, whether through science class or theatre, is completely unacceptable in the context of an educational institution", continued Mr Koutalianos. He continued, "The science has been politicized and is disputed and our children should not have to carry the weight of the world on their shoulders. Climate/carbon propaganda should be kept out of our schools, until the adults sort out the truth from the lies."'

#2011 http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/muehlenberg/2011/07/greens-terrorising-our-children
Herbert London penned a volume back in 1984 entitled, Why Are They Lying To Our Children? In it he looked at how the classroom has become a battleground, as our children are being intimidated and threatened with a lot of Green agitprop.

He began his book this way: "War, famine, environmental disasters, material shortages, and a declining quality of life - that's what schoolchildren are being taught to expect in their futures. What these grim and mostly inaccurate forecasts are doing to their lives I don't know for sure. But I do know this: Our children are absorbing excessively negative misinformation."

#2013 ' Why are there so many stupid people in the world continuing to emit greenhouse gases without considering my future (again, highly paraphrased from 5-year old syntax)? You know, I couldn't honestly answer, because these are the same questions I've been asking myself for years. Do

you know what a 5-year old does when contemplating an uncertain and dangerous future that seems to have no solution? She cries. She has nightmares, and her naïve mind can't comprehend why anyone would let this happen to her, or why her parents can't spare her that fate. Her worst episodes lasted about 2 weeks, but the subject is brought up now again and again.'
http://conservationbytes.com/2013/01/21/scaring-our-children/#comment-23918

#2017. A grown-up victim of the CO2 Scaremongering said her fears made her want to become a climate scientist so presumably she was anxious about climate as a child in high school. http://www.smh.com.au/comment/im-worried-having-a-baby-will-make-climate-change-worse-20170314-guxtqq.html Her hypocrisy re childbearing is mentioned here along with another example from the States: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/03/19/aussie-climate-scientist-having-a-baby-is-an-ethical-entanglement/ A more sympathetic view of the poor woman's plight is taken here: http://joannenova.com.au/2017/03/all-australians-are-detrimental-climate-scientist-worries-that-her-baby-will-cause-floods-droughts-and-warm-globe/

#2018 Demonstrations using children. A result of successful brainwashing in Australian schools - pupils taking the day off from school to parrot the usual tripe about climate catastrophe. No doubt many are genuinely scared.
'It's really scary for us, to see how it's going to impact our future," she said, citing fears about rising sea levels and extreme weather events.'
And of course the campaigners behind these events will use them to up the ante with politicians to try to keep their bandwagon rolling along. Fortunately the wheels on it might almost be gone now, and only inertia is keeping it going - one can but hope.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-46380418

#2007 'The amount of propaganda poured into the heads of little children in the name of education is astonishing. Case in point: I just received a letter from a little girl in elementary school asking why I don't believe in global warming. She said her class had watched Al Gore's outrageous propaganda file, "An Inconvenient Truth," and then her letter began to spew all of its incredible inaccuracies. She was writing to me because she wanted to know why I didn't believe in global warming.'
http://www.canadafreepress.com/2007/deweese030807.htm

#2011. Not directly about a frightened child, but certainly about an anxious one, and certainly about the lengths that some teachers will go to get compliance with their eco-notions:
'...his parents discover that he has been excluded from taking part in a draw (in which a stuffed toy was the prize) because an earlier sandwich had been similarly packaged in a supposedly environmentally unfriendly plastic bag...'
http://nofrakkingconsensus.wordpress.com/2011/02/01/teachers-the-new-green-police/

#2014 'McLean, a normally upbeat youth, is painfully aware of the sheer power of Mother Nature and the carnage its fury can wreak. She's now anxious about what we're doing to our environment. "I volunteered to take an active role in my school's Model United Nations, which is studying the impact climate change is having on our planet," she said.'
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health-and-fitness/health/youth-anxiety-on-the-rise-amid-changing-climate/article18372258/

Czech Republic

#2012 A blog post on climate scare stories and children. Concludes that the cult of climate apocalypse should be banned from schools. http://kremlik.blog.idnes.cz/c/250261/Strach-z-oteplovani-privadi-lidi-na-psychiatrii-a-desi-deti.html

It's the same in Germany. My friends 10 year old son recently came home from school and told his mum that he wished he had never been born. When she asked why he said we are killing the planet, I don't deserve to live.
That's what this brainwashing is doing to kids. Kids who should be looking forward to life, as I was at his age.
It's a crime against the young and vulnerable.'

here: 'It doesn't matter what the science turns up. The enviro-brainwashers aren't interested in it. They are into changing behaviour - getting everybody to believe their phoney doomsday scenarios and have them behave in fear accordingly. It hardly can get worse. Their target with the little ones is to turn them into greenshirts' http://notrickszone.com/2010/11/01/climate-change-dis-education-at-german-primary-schools/

#2009 A study in 2007 'in the German federal state of Hessen. 9-14 years old children where asked
to descrive their emotions while following the discussion about climate change. Classifying the emotions in different clusters the results show that children mainly experience consequence-based, prospective emotions like "fear of destruction" and ethic-based, self related emotions like „a bad conscience", but accordingly climate related emotions have no negative impact on the children's general well-being.'
Source: Climate Change: Global Risks, Challenges and Decisions IOP Publishing
IOP Conf. Series: Earth and Environmental Science 6 (2009) 572002 doi:10.1088/1755-1307/6/7/572002 http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1755-1307/6/57/572002

#2012 'Global warming and melting glaciers will have damaging effects on the planet without exception to any individual or country' 14-year old from Goa
http://studentsonice.com/blog/general/what-did-you-do-when-you-were-14

New Zealand
#2012 Scaring the young is a clear goal of climate extremists, and then seeking out some of them to be 'poster-children' is just a PR move. Here is a report of one 17-year old who won a competition to speak at the Rio festival of fatuous malevolent pomposity by saying this "What kind of a future do I want? Frankly, I'd just be happy to have a future - to have that guaranteed - because right now, it's not.": http://grist.org/politics/seventeen-year-old-tells-world-leaders-to-step-up-give-her-a-future/
[hat-tip: Tom Nelson]

#2014 An academic paper based on a survey of schoolchildren notes ' On the effects of climate change, the children believed that poverty, low agricultural production, reduction in care of livestock, increased vector-borne diseases and water-borne diseases, poor water quality, bush burning, extraction of fuel wood, drowning, malnutrition, school drop-out, mental and physical trauma are the results of climate change.'
So pretty much all that's bad is due to climate change!! Do the academics conclude that something needs to be done to help these children get a more sensible perspective? No, of course not. They conclude that the children are ripe for more propaganda. Imagine if they get the British Council in, or Friends of the Earth, to explain that it is all due to the western world. What further poisoning of the children's views would take place!
http://www.academia.edu/10721291/School_children_s_perception_of_climate_change_and_possible_remediation
Note. After making this entry, I came across this post about agriculture booming in Africa: https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2015/08/11/how-agriculture-is-booming-in-africa/ I wonder what the children would make of that?

#2017. Children being exploited by fanatics intent on legal action to promote climate alarm and the associated damaging policy prescriptions. Most of the children were upset by the recent forest fires in Portugal, and that seems to have attracted the interest of the fanatics:
http://edition.cnn.com/2017/10/19/europe/portugal-children-climate-change
Let us hope this is not a new template for the fanatics: look out for disasters and tragedies associated with weather, and recruit children there to front legal actions.

a recent study by the World Wildlife Foundation (WWF) showed that 80 percent of Sweden's young people (ages 15-25) worry about how climate change will affect their future. Moreover, half of the respondents think about climate change once a week or more often, and no less than 25 percent experience stomach pains or unhappiness when they do so.'.

#2018 'A 15-year old Swedish girl is protesting global warming by engaging in a school strike for climate action and refusing to attend her classes. Greta Thunberg declared that it was pointless to attend her classes due to the impending "climate crisis." '
http://www.climatedepot.com/2018/10/01/this-is-my-cry-for-help-15-year-old-skips-school-for-climate-strike-why-should-we-be-studying-for-a-future-thats-soon-to-be-no-more/

United Kingdom

#2006 Climate change is kids' top fear - the headline
The results showed three quarters of 11 to 14-year-olds worry about climate change, compared to 41% who are worried about going out with someone.

And it looks like you lot aren't just all talk - 63% turn off the lights when you leave a room, 82% of you recycle, and 75% say we should recycle more.
The survey quizzed 1,554 kids on their views on the environment."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/newsid_6140000/newsid_6146300/6146300.stm

# 2007. More examples, and some insight into people who choose to frighten children for their own ends:

'If the aim of the politics of environmentalism is to scare people, then it has succeeded. Green writer George Monbiot declared in his book Heat that he wanted to 'make people so depressed about the state of the planet that they stay in bed all day, thereby reducing their consumption of fossil fuels'. He may not succeed in keeping people in bed all day, but the panic that he and other environmentalists are helping to foster does seem to be keeping kids awake in their beds at night.

' A recent survey of 1,150 seven- to 11-year-olds in Britain found that half of them often lose sleep from lying in bed worrying about climate change. One in four blamed politicians for the problem while one in seven declared their own parents weren't doing enough to save the planet (1). The aim of spiked eco-columnist Ethan Greenhart's sinister educational manifesto - 'If we can make children feel bad about the damage they cause to the environment, it can only cause them to make better choices than their parents' - seems to be coming true (2).'
See: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/2950/

#2007
'Climate change alarmists like Schneider, Al Gore, or George Monbiot (to name just a few), have spent the past decade forcing global warming nightmares down children's throats. Now surprise, surprise, children are having real nightmares about the hypothetical problems relating to global warming. If anything, as Lee Jones rightfully argued, this 'should be a wake-up call for all the purveyors of the 'politics of fear'. However, the UK education secretary Alan Johnson has more eco-brainwashing plans for manipulating, and micromanaging the lives of British children. The plans are part of a new major review of the secondary school curriculum, with an added new emphasis on... you guessed it - climate change....
I'll leave the last words to Alice, a seemingly frightened 10 year old from Plymouth, who wrote in to CBBC Newsround programme to talk about what scares her and keeps her awake at night - I wonder where she got this idea from?

"I fear that the gases all around me that are poisoning our earth and atmosphere can either kill me or kill anmials while we sleep because if that's what they're doing to the earth they could do it to me!" '

http://neo-jacobins.blogspot.com/2007/03/eco-alarmism-its-giving-kids-nightmares.html

'
#2007 A British supermarket does a survey of children, and here is a report of their findings:
Children losing sleep over global warming Published Date: 23 February 2007 By ALAN JONES

HALF of children between the ages of seven and 11 are anxious about the effects of global warming and often lose sleep over it, according to a new report.

A survey of 1,150 youngsters found that one in four blamed politicians for the problems of climate change, while one in seven said their own parents were not doing enough to improve the environment.

The most feared consequences of global warming included poor health, the possible submergence of entire countries and the welfare of animals.

Most of those polled in the survey by supermarket chain Somerfield understood the benefits of recycling - although one in ten thought it was linked to riding a bike.

Pete Williams, of Somerfield, said: "Kids are exposed to the hard facts as much as anybody. While many adults may look the other way, this study should show that global warming is not only hurting the children of the future, it's affecting the welfare of kids now." '

See: http://news.scotsman.com/uk/Children-losing-sleep-over-global.3348964.jp
Note the ruthless arrogance of the Somerfield spokesman.

# 2007: The Primary Review Regional Witness Sessions
'A review from Cambridge University, reported early in October in 2007, suggests that too much pressure on today's primary school children is leading to stress and anxiety. The independently funded Primary Review is based in the university's faculty of education and is an interim report which will be followed by a further 31, before the final, full report in 2008. What we have is a small part of the whole, but the words 'anxiety' and 'stress' should set alarm bells ringing. Is this what primary education is about? Are we really developing an education system where increasingly effective teaching is raising standards only to make children stressed and anxious? If this is the case, can we just carry on regardless, or do we need to think carefully about what we are doing?

What does the review say?
The review suggests that today's primary school children are suffering from stress and deep anxiety about modern life. National tests, combined with concerns about anti-social behaviour and climate change are forcing children to grow up too soon.'
http://www.teachingexpertise.com/articles/childrens-stress-and-anxiety-2996
More details here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7039966.stm
and here: http://www.primaryreview.org.uk/media/media_archive_2007.php

#2008 'My work is in plant response to climate change, when eco-systems shut down. I was at school when I went to a lecture by an Exxon Mobil executive and I was terrified. I thought I have to do something useful with my life, so I moved into biology.' Confessions of an activist! But she'll need to take care over referencing Exxon Mobil, since her movement sees it as bad, bad, bad. More on her and similar victims of the scaremongering here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/dec/14/environmental-activists-climate-change

#2009 Deliberate scaring of children by the government's tv advert campaign led to many complaints about frightened children. Indeed their video featured a scared child being read a scary tale of climate nonsense. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/oct/16/complaints-government-climate-change-ad

# 2009. The BBC is notorious for having chosen to promote the scare about CO2 as if it was 'settled science'. The link given next is to a site by someone who claimed to have worked as a producer for the BBC, and this seems credible (2 clues: he takes the EU as a good thing which only cranks could oppose, and he has no doubts about climate). His piece begins:
' A friend surprised me this week when she said that a significant number of 7-10 year olds are starting to have nightmares about climate change. "It's as scary for them as the H-bomb threat was for us." It set me thinking about what exactly it takes to scare the pants off a generation.'

Why would that surprise anyone who has seen what the BBC have been pushing out. The writer was even part of it. He writes:

When environmental stories became mainstream, around 1991, we ran a string of them but somehow however hard I tried to sugar coat it, they all had the same implicit ending "... whatever we do, the baby seals are gonna die, and there's nothing you can do ..."

' Catherine Mitchell: "Source: United States of America
#1995 USA Some quotes:
Melissa Poe, age nine: "Mr. President, if you ignore this letter we will all die of pollution and the ozone layer" (from Newsweek "Just for Kids!?!").
Our Earth is getting hotter every minute and the only way we can stop it is to stop burning styrofoam. I'm also too young to die, might I add, so stop burning the Earth!" (from the FACE newsletter).
Jesse Hornstein, age 10: " http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/ecokids-new-automatons-on-the-block#axzz2SmwDsjgv No gases! No air pollution! It's life or death" (from 50 Simple Things).
Adam Adler, age 11: " I think global warming and the greenhouse effect are very bad! What do we want the earth to become, a flaming ball?" (from 50 Simple Things).'

#1999 USA 'Shortly after Earth Day in 1997, for instance, a parent wrote a letter to the New York Times:"I have noticed a disturbing trend. With each passing school year, my children are more convinced that humans and technology are bad for the planet....While teachers are helping to insure a 'greener' future, I do not think they understand that children may infer a condemnation of humanity."'
http://cei.org/news-letters-cei-planet/too-much-fear-too-few-facts

#2006 An example from California:
' During my ephemeral teaching career in Los Angeles, there were numerous troubling examples of educational ludicrousness and lunacy. Of all the examples, the environmental "indoctrination" of my students was the most disconcerting. Doubtlessly, California schools' obsession with the environment is incomparable with most other states, but the anecdotal evidence I mentally compiled is striking.
It wasn't only that the students were regularly pulled from my class at inopportune times to have the same information ingrained into their ten year-old psyches, but rather, that the messages a high percentage of these groups pontificated were that human-beings are inherently bad people, animal killers, and we are collectively ruining our once-beautiful earth.
Consider the presentation made by a college theater group from UCLA. Showing no interest in a balanced engagement with the issues, the group instead staged a 20-minute play whose theme can be summarized thusly and unfortunately: Once upon a time, the Earth was beautiful. Then humans came and destroyed it. To appreciate the effect of such simplistic narratives on students, consider the reaction of a confused little girl in my classroom. Visibly upset, she approached me after the play to ask: �Are we really ruining the Earth�? I did my best to explain, as objectively as possible, that the reality was a bit more complicated that the play would have her believe. But this had little effect.'
See: http://newsbyus.com/more.php?id=1853_0_1_0_M

#2006 'My 8-year-old daughter has just come running to me in a flood of tears. Why? Because she thinks the world is going to end sometime soon and it's the fault of me and, to a lesser extent, my generation. That's why. Why does she think that? Because she takes it for gospel that over bearing boffins like yourself know more than ordinary folk like me. Does it make you feel good? Making an eight-year-old girl with a mouth brace bawl her little eyes out?'
http://www.grist.org/article/scary-movies/

#2007 'Sean Hussey and his twin sister, Erin, are only 9 years old, but they already know all about global warming. And they're worried, very worried. Teachers at their Hillsborough, Calif., school have shown them pictures of melting glaciers. Sean fears that polar bears will be left homeless. "I like polar bears a lot," he explains. Erin is also concerned about what she calls "the animal side" of climate change. "There are lots of animals that shouldn't die," she says. "The humans are the ones who are causing it."'
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2007/04/15/will-polar-bears-be-ok.html

#2007. S enator Inhofe accuses Hollywood of setting out to scare children on climate.
'Children are now the number one target of the global warming fear campaign. DiCaprio announced his goal was to recruit young eco-activists to the cause.

"We need to get kids young," DiCaprio said in a September 20 with USA Weekend.

Hollywood activist Laurie David, Gore's co-producer of "An Inconvenient Truth" recently co-authored a children's global warming book with Cambria Gordon for Scholastic Books titled, The Down-To-Earth Guide to Global Warming.

David has made it clear that her goal is to influence young minds with her new book when she recently wrote an open letter to her children stating: "We want you to grow up to be activists."

Apparently, David and other activists are getting frustrated by the widespread skepticism on climate as reflected in both the U.S. and the UK according to the latest polls.

It appears the alarmists are failing to convince adults to believe their increasingly shrill and scientifically unfounded rhetoric, so they have decided kids are an easier sell.'

' Nine year old: 'I don't want to die' from global warming

A Canadian high school student named McKenzie was shown Gore's climate horror film in four different classes.

"I really don't understand why they keep showing it," McKenzie said on May 19, 2007. ( )

In June, a fourth grade class from Portland Maine's East End Community School issued a dire climate report: "Global warming is a huge pending global disaster" read the elementary school kids' report according to an article in the Portland Press Herald on June 14, 2007. Remember, these are fourth graders issuing a dire global warming report. ( )

And this agenda of indoctrination and fear aimed at children is having an impact.

Nine year old Alyssa Luz-Ricca was quoted in the Washington Post on April 16, 2007 as saying:

"I worry about [global warming] because I don't want to die." ( )

The same article explained: "Psychologists say they're seeing an increasing number of young patients preoccupied by a climactic Armageddon." '

'The boy has drawn, in his third-grade class, a global warming timeline that is his equivalent of the mushroom cloud.
"That's the Earth now," the 9-year-old says, pointing to a dark shape at the bottom. "And then," he says, tracing the progressively lighter stripes across the page, "it's just starting to fade away."
Alex Hendel of Arlington County is talking about the end of life on our beleaguered planet. Looking up to make sure his mother is following along, he taps the final stripe, which is so sparsely dotted it is almost invisible. "In 20 years," he pronounces, "there's no oxygen." Then, to dramatize the point, he collapses, "dead," to the floor.'
'Parents say they're searching for "productive" outlets for their 8-year-olds' obsessions with dying polar bears. Teachers say enrollment in high school and college environmental studies classes is doubling year after year. And psychologists say they're seeing an increasing number of young patients preoccupied by a climactic Armageddon.'
'Goldstein adds: "In my practice, they bring this up. Some of the kids are scared, and it's interesting, because I've seen an evolution. . . . Kids used to have fears of war and nuclear annihilation. That's dissipated and been replaced by global warming." '
'"If you follow global warming, every prediction is scarier than the prior one. It's really scary stuff. Global warming is this huge uncertainty, and we see it compromising our future.
"So much of going to school," he says, "is getting an education and preparing yourself for the future. But . . . what's the use of a college degree when Wall Street is under water?"'
'"I don't like global warming," Alyssa continues, her eyes huge and serious behind her glasses, a stardust of freckles across her nose, "because it kills animals, and I like animals."'
'"I worry about it," says this girl who has yet to lose all her baby teeth, "because I don't want to die.'

# 2009. A survey in the States in 2009:
'There's a new bogeyman lurking in the closet, and this one isn't imaginary. Us. One out of three children aged 6 to 11 fears that Ma Earth won't exist when they grow up, while more than half-56 percent-worry that the planet will be a blasted heath (or at least a very unpleasant place to live), according to a new survey.
Commissioned by Habitat Heroes and conducted by Opinion Research, the telephone survey polled a national sample of 500 American preteens-250 males and 250 females.
On a sliding scale of anxieties, minority kids have it worst; 75 percent of black children and 65 percent of Hispanic children believe that the planet will be irrevocably damaged by the time they reach adulthood.'
Hard to get more info on this survey, which makes it look dubious to me. Even in the States, I suspect telephone surveys of 6 year olds sound implausible.

See: http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/04/kids-worry-about-environment.php

#2009 Also referencing the Habitat Heroes survey:http://noapologies.ca/guest-columnists/humanist-end-times-mythologizing-terrifies-children (dead link spotted 24 June 2013, but see next entry for a replacement).

'The demise of the planet? Well, that would scare anybody. And apparently it's scaring children.
We see "the demise of the planet" as secular humanism's End Times prophecy.
It has often been observed that secularists imitate Christianity. They have scriptures - the writings of Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, John Dewey, etc. They have a priesthood - public school teachers, college professors, the news media, and others. They have their own strange equivalents of saints and martyrs, holy places, holy days like Earth Day, and so on.
Now they have an End Times scenario, too: the human race just goes on driving SUVs, eating meat, using incandescent light bulbs and toilet paper, and all of Planet Earth goes down the chute. All life goes extinct, starting with polar bears.'

#2009(?)A religious sitegives some more background on this Habitat Heroes survey, which may be using the same article linked to at 'noapologies.ca' above. That link no longer seems to work, so here is the new one: http://chalcedon.edu/research/articles/humanist-doomsday-myth-scares-children/

#2009 ' Those of us raising families know too well the drumbeat of fear that is used to manipulate our children into serfs for the environmental left. As a parent, it's taken a concerted effort to counter the onslaught of political propaganda that passes for the science curriculum, not only to help my children learn the truth, but to quell the anxiety it's meant to stir up.'
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/dec/02/hicks-climate-fears-harm-children/

# 2009
'The opening film at the Copenhagen "climate meeting" was an apt reminder of the long-term damage done by global warming propagandists. A little girl has nightmares about being alone in a desert where her life is threatened by floods and hurricanes.
Al Gore's sci-fi horror fantasy in documentary style - An Inconvenient Truth - has been shown to school children, as young as 4 years old, around the world for years. Lesson plans aimed to convince children that the threat was real and that anyone doubting the message was wrong. They intentionally frightened children into emotional and psychological trauma.
Closing the Copenhagen film, many children repeated the phrase; "Please help save the world." Now parents and teachers are faced with the sticky question of how that should be done. How can we deprogram millions of children the world over without allowing the experience to leave permanent psychological scars?'
http://gunnyg.wordpress.com/2009/12/11/deprogramming-children-after-global-warming-scam/

#2009. Unreferenced mention of a survey ' BrainPOP, a New York based educational provider, conducted a survey (possible in 2008?) of more than 1,000 middle school students across the country and found that kids fear global warming more than war, terrorism or the health care crisis.'
http://www.education.com/magazine/article/Global_Warming_Savvy/ (quoted here: http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=3671 )
Another link to it here: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/kids-fear-global-warming-more-than-terrorism-car-crashes-and-cancer-according-to-national-earth-day-survey-58684647.html

#2010. California. A young person in therapy recalls some of her childhood:
' When Emma returned the next week (thankfully), I asked about her reaction. She flooded me with stories about indoctrination by teachers. One of her earliest memories was singing songs on Earth Day, prayerfully, when she was five.

A sensitive soul, Emma became terrified that her beloved Earth would perish, and that she'd be culpable. Starting in third grade, she became an environmental fanatic. Emma went ballistic on her disabled grandmother when the old woman threw a bottle in the trash.

After school, she and her friends would sift through other people's garbage to root out recyclables. While Berkeley has plenty of homeless folks going through trash, Emma and her friends were out to save the world.

The poor thing would even sob in her car when she had to drive more than a few miles. She envisioned the pollution burning up the rain forests and asphyxiating polar bears.'

See: http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/04/why_i_am_enlarging_my_carbon_f.html

#2010 'My son came home from school today with some terrible news. He's destroying the planet. Now, my wife and I might have to sell him off to save Mother Earth. Thank God his teachers alerted us.
And that's the problem with teaching children about protecting the Earth these days: Some schools want to scare the hell out of them.'
http://www.sodahead.com/united-states/dont-scare-kids-into-saving-planet/blog-272651/?page=31#comments
#2011. Not a frightened child, but instead a frightened child-like teacher from a US high school:

" My journey in climate change has gone from dawning realization, to "holy shit!" to terror and fierce urgency to protect my children, and now sadly, inevitably, to despair." Quite unfit to be a teacher in my opinion, and possibly in need of medical help - see the link for even more unhinged stuff. One wonders at the impression he makes on his classes. Perhaps the kids see through him?

http://joannenova.com.au/2011/01/a-willing-victim-of-false-faith-cravens-solution-scream-louder/

#2011 Essay on scary materials for children from NASA
http://www.newsrealblog.com/2011/01/29/nasa-joins-climate-change-alarmists-to-frighten-children/

#2011 A child activist, who started a climate alarmist movement along with his mother, is being used to front a legal action in the States. He describes his vivid views here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/may/05/sueing-us-government-climate e.g. ' Our addiction to fossil fuels is messing up the perfect balance of nature and threatening the survival of my generation' (hat tip FS)

#2011 Radical Environmentalism in schools - (site updated 6 October 2011) (mainly USA). http://www.akdart.com/edu11.html ' This page is about the specific issue of environmentalism in American schools. It is my goal to provide enough anecdotal evidence to show that the schools are being used as more to indoctrinate kids than to give them the ability to make wise decisions and sort out truth from fiction.'

#2011 'Anxiety also leads to paranoia and then to cult thinking, with its us/them view of the world and its demonization of one's opponents. It also leads to massive propaganda efforts to convert people to one's cause. Thus we find that the true believers in global warming have mounted an insidious campaign to indoctrinate grade school children with their belief system. The main tool at their disposal is fear. Children now are as anxious about the future of the planet as are the fanatics. Thus do they rob childhood of any of any of the joyful insouciance that it once possessed.'
http://blog.deeperquestions.com/blog/the-anxiety-underlying-global-warming-hysteria/

#2012A mother notices the harm that can be done to children by casual alarmism. Imagine the impact of deliberate, child-targeted alarmism! Extract: 'Yet very few people think twice about walking into the kitchen, pulling up a chair, and saying things like "this world is going to h-e-double hockey sticks. If the earth's temperature rises just a few more degrees, that'll be the end of the human race!"
Okay, call me weird. I really don't care if you say "hell" in front of my children. But it seriously irks me that grown ups don't consider the trauma they're inflicting on worried young minds by suggesting to them that their lives, and all the beautiful nature that feeds their souls, are inevitably coming to an end.'Source: http://www.shannonhayes.info/blog.htm?post=842332

#2012 California. 'Kids think we're better off dead' More of the awful consequences for childrens' spirits of the onslaught of alarmist propaganda is illustrated here: http://www.wnd.com/2012/04/2012-school-kids-think-were-better-off-dead/ Extract: 'A 12-year-old girl has responded with the stunning "I wish we didn't exist" to questions about how she feels about pollution and humanity's impact on the earth, according to a new video released by Brian Sussman, author of "Eco-Tyranny: How the Left's Green Agenda will Dismantle America."
The response came from a 6th-grade girl identified only as Kalie, from Gault Elementary. Sussman met her during Earth Day events in Santa Cruz, Calif., recently, where he traveled to ask "What is the most serious threat facing mankind?"' A video recording of the interview is here:
http://youtu.be/dCVByNJ13Mk
See also: http://toryaardvark.com/2012/04/25/brainwashing-our-children-with-politically-correct-green-guilt/
#2012 A comment added to a post on one of the more unhinged climate alarm sites is purportedly from a 17-year old who claims to be in despair over climate and who wishes horrible deaths on 'oil/coal people'is reproduced and discussed here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/05/29/a-student-in-despair-over-romms-11f-by-2050-article-if-this-comment-was-reversed-it-would-be-called-a-death-threat/#more-64496
#2012 Maine A mother scares her own children about climate, triggered by a wish not to drive them to a nearby event: 'I tell them that the Arctic is melting, that hurricanes are getting stronger, droughts are lengthening, and rainfall records are being shattered. Within their lifetimes, sea level could rise by 6 feet, or more, submerging the world's coastal cities....

#2013 Texas. This is a n example of a child at risk of being made anxiou s by his clearl y very anxious parents who fear 'going up in flames': ' My husband and I are extremely lucky to live in a walkable neighborhood with necessities nearby - supermarket, library, bilingual preschool, and I can bike/bus to work. My issue is that now that we have a baby, all the other moms drive their kids all over the place, shopping and taking cute little day trips. I would prefer to drive only in emergencies, but our entertainment options near home are severely limited. Is it better to leave a smaller carbon footprint and make a moral statement my son might be proud of one day, or to have additional experiences with him/relationships with kids and moms across town that I will treasure until we all go up in flames?
Austin, Texas
http://grist.org/living/ask-umbra-can-i-have-a-kid-and-be-car-free/

#2013 'Hoyos says her 7-year-old, Kai, is already aware of climate change."It comes from me. It comes from school. Exposure they get to the media ... all the coverage [of Super storm] Sandy or drought," said Hoyos. "Kids ask questions if they hear things in the news ... sometimes kids are afraid. 'All the fires, are they going to come here?'" http://www.thehartfordguardian.com/2013/06/04/the-talk-how-to-tell-your-8-year-old-about-climate-change/ Connecticut. A report of desperately anxious parents, who in turn report anxious children: '

#2013 Michigan. A sobering display of the impact of climate propaganda on young people. Some of the victims speak out here, as yet unaware they are victims. One extract: ' Global warming is a serious topic because it destroys our environment, will make earth so hot that it will become uninhabitable, and creates so much heat you could actually fry eggs on the sidewalk.'
http://www.mlive.com/opinion/kalamazoo/index.ssf/2013/06/middle_school_new_global_warmi_11.html

#2013 USA. A young adult who has probably been exposed to climate alarm all her life, is suggesting that more people need to be as scared about it as she is: ' That is why I completely support GlobalSolution.org's #CoverClimate campaign. I definitely think a major part of the problem is the lack of urgency felt by the general public, in part due to lack of climate change coverage or failure of the media to connect extreme weather events they cover to climate change. I think in this case, fear is a good thing. More people need to be as scared as I am because that is the only way change will happen.'
http://globalsolutions.org/blog/2013/06/Being-Scared-about-Climate-Change#comment-369

#2014 Hawai. Young poets to be concerned about. Poems the teachers should be ashamed about. Some heartfelt horror by '5th grade' youngsters in some school. I don't have the date of them, just the data I found them:
http://www.childrenoftheearth.org/Kid's%20Entries/global_warming_Dore_class.htm

Not long ago my wife and I went out to dinner at a restaurant with another couple, who, like us, have two boys. The conversation inevitably turned to our kids, school, family stuff. Their older son made the transition this year to junior high school. I asked how this was going. Pretty well, the mother said, except he had recently become anxious and wasn't sleeping well. " #2014 Journalist Keith Kloor relates 'He's worried about climate change," she said. " It's keeping him up at night."

Shortly after that outing, my wife and I had dinner with another couple. Again, the conversation revolved around our kids. (They have a 13-year old son and an 11-year old daughter). Their teenage boy, I learned, was also having anxiety and sleep issues. "He's become obsessed with climate change," the father told me. " He thinks the world is doomed."

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/collideascape/2014/03/14/11/

#2014 Massachusetts 'She watched Disruption and her mom asked her how it made her feel. This is what she said. [I'm 10 and I'm angry.]'

Spotted at the climate march in New York on 21 Sep 2014.

http://grist.org/climate-energy/meet-a-climate-marcher/

#2014 North Carolina. 'North Carolina-based psychotherapist Chris Saade, co-director of the Olive Branch Center, a grief/wellness counselling firm, says he's seen a huge jump in the number of patients under 18 who come to him with concerns about the environmental crisis.'
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health-and-fitness/health/youth-anxiety-on-the-rise-amid-changing-climate/article18372258/

#2014 'CONSTANT CLIMATE CHANGE FEAR-MONGERING IS TURNING OUR KIDS INTO NEUROTIC WRECKS'
Author Donna Quixote writes:'... I take great issue with what we are doing to our children. These poor kids are blasted daily with all sorts of fear-mongering and cataclysmic predictions of the terrible fate that awaits them.'
http://quixoteslaststand.com/2014/05/05/constant-climate-change-fear-mongering-is-turning-our-kids-into-neurotic-wrecks/

This looks promising, since a great many children and adults may well benefit from wise counselling to assure them that the risk of climate catastrophe has been hyped out of all proportion to the evidence-base for it, and that they should turn their concerns in other directions. But no, this young lady is but a victim of the scaremongering who wishes to commiserate with other victims in order to cheer themselves up a bit: ' I'm scared for the effects of climate change on the world I love. Rather than try to think about, save, or mourn for the whole world, I decided to think about my city and state, and the living creatures - including other humans - who share it with me.'
https://climateanxietycounseling.wordpress.com/about/

Source: Hat-tip: #2016 A victim of the scaremongering delays having children. I guess she was at college say 25 years ago, and high school a few years before that. So, around the time Wirth was plotting about Hansen's performing seal spot at the 1988 Hearings. Lots of publicity generated by that. She may well have been anxious about climate as a child, and took her fears with her into adulthood. For example ' My husband and I had made a home in Seattle for several years, and my friends of childbearing age tended to be writers and activists, scientists and scholars. When considering kids, they weighed not only their desires and finances but the state of the world. Many of them had read grim prognoses of what climate change would do to life on Earth. Even in the restrained language of science, the future holds unprecedented difficulties and disasters. For many people, these problems were an abstraction, but as an environmental journalist, I knew enough to imagine them in front of me. Driving across the bridge to my house, I pictured city beaches drowned by the rising sea. http://www.thenation.com/article/how-do-you-decide-to-have-a-baby-when-climate-change-is-remaking-life-on-earth/
Greenie-watch. Scroll to section beginning '
Credulous woman believes the doomsters'
#2017 A grandchild of the unspeakable James Hansen displays the success of his efforts to teach her what to think: "I am afraid and I am angry at the problems that greedy and foolish adults have created," said Kivlehan, speaking on the sidelines of U.N. climate talks.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bonn-climatechange-lawsuit/im-afraid-and-angry-says-18-year-old-leading-climate-legal-fight-idUSKBN1D71MC
#2016 An update on the shameful legal action promoted by James Hansen with children pushed into it as stooges: ' Precisely what is the children's climate lawsuit trying to achieve? It cannot be protection of our constitutional principles, or protection of future generations, or environmental improvement. Only one possibility remains: It is part of the long-term effort by the environmental left to use any means possible to exert control over other people's property, economic choices, and lifestyles. The plaintiff attorneys are happy to participate in a litigation process in which "the children" are irrelevant.'
https://www.investors.com/politics/commentary/the-childrens-climate-lawsuit-against-the-children/

#2012 Children shown in news clip dressed up as penguins and pushing climate propaganda and alarm - the usual stuff (hat tip: http://tomnelson.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/we-saved-brainwashed-vietnamese.html): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6kU3w3o8Sc#t=1m45s
#2018 This really sickening. Recent floods in Vietnam have clearly scared children. A UK researcher, and the odious BBC, want their reactions to be seen as reactions to 'climate change'. Ambulance chasing? Exploitation of children for political ends? What a horrible business these people, these 'researchers', are involved in.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-45738136

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Climate-anxiety: reports of frightened children

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Last update: 30 November 2018 I want to provide links to reports, comments, and discussions of children being frightened by what they have been told about climate change or how they have been told it.

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Pre T trau Stress Disorder  Mohrtoons cartoon

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Technology has changed our classrooms. there are ways that both teachers and students learn that were not available before digital technology. while some of this technology has advanced our methods of learning, many are worried that we rely too much on this technology. Some claim that technology has even changed the way students communicate, there are studies that show young generations losing their ability to socialize. While schools become more reliable in technology there is still a digital divide with students not being able to access these tools from home. Technology might continue to advance, but basic tools should not be forgotten since they are just as useful in a classroom setting.

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Technology in schools: Too much screen time? | Charlotte Observer

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There's no question technology can transform schools and education, but too much screen time could cause problems for students.

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This cartoon depicts ESSA as a larger version of NCLB. the website where this website is from opposes common core standards and ESSA. According to the post, ESSA does not protect students or parental privacy under the law. Common core standards are forcing information on children that have little to no relevance in student's lives. it does not encourage skills necessary for success in pursuit of carrier or work.

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2015-12 News | Statement on the Passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act

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The following statement was released by Dr. Karen Effrem, president of Education Liberty Watc h and the executive director of the Florida Stop Common Core Coalition , and Randy Osborne, director of education for .....

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Many teachers believe that classrooms these days spend too much time either preparing for a test or taking a test. High Stakes tests were priority in the classroom, but with ESSA schools can use different forms  assessment. There are seven leading states that are searching alternative forms of assessment such as portfolios and projects. A pilot program; The Performance Assessment of Competency Education (PACE) is set to replace standard multiple-choice questions for more meaningful tasks that encourage students to apply what they have learned in sophisticated ways and to use critical thinking and problem solving skills.

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Standardized testing has become so ingrained into her school year that Rebecca Lippy, a fifth-grade teacher at Maryland City Elementary School in Laurel, Maryland, has a hard time imagining how the new Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which has replaced No Child Left Behind, is going to make a difference in her classroom.

"I think right now testing is so institutionalized that it's hard for educators to see a light at the end of the tunnel," says Lippy, a member of the Maryland State Education Association (MSEA).

But she does see a glimmer, and she says she's cautiously optimistic that maybe the new national education law can bring about the positive changes she's heard about from MSEA. These include a reduction in time spent on testing, the ability for teachers to use their own judgment and expertise to determine what skills their students need to focus on, and an increase in cultural relevancy on the required assessments for students in urban Title I schools like hers (no more questions for city kids about sail boats or babbling brooks!).

But when will all of these changes take place? Gradually, say policy experts, because limited regulations around the law are currently being negotiated at the U.S. Department of Education with key stakeholders, including selected NEA members.

"Even though there is a lot of work ahead, ESSA will be a game-changer, especially if educators get involved in the process in their states and districts now to make sure new assessments are developed with their input and expertise," says Beth Foley, a senior policy analyst at the National Education Association.

Foley recommends that educators reach out to their NEA affiliate and offer to share good practices. They can find ways to get involved in ESSA implementation at the local level, and even help set up monthly meetings with parents and administrators at their schools to make sure ESSA focuses on student growth rather than proficiency.

"Collaboration and partnerships are critical," Foley says.

Here's how ESSA will impact assessments:

1. No More High Stakes

While there will still be tests in reading/language arts and math every year from third to eighth grade and once in high school, ESSA removes the high stakes that have been attached to standardized testing under NCLB. Under ESSA, schools and teachers can no longer be considered failing just because of low test scores. The goal is to ease the pressures of testing and bring an end to the test prep mania that for years has consumed schools worried they wouldn't meet Annual Yearly Progress (AYP) and face closure, firing of staff, or other sanctions.

2. More State and District Control

ESSA dramatically reduces the power of the U.S. Department of Education and gives states authority to design and implement the most appropriate assessments.

"In high school, for example, the law will allow the ACT or the SAT to be used for the state assessment," says Foley. "People are happy about that because it means students won't have to take more standardized tests, and it opens doors for students who thought they'd never be college bound because they wouldn't be able to pass the SAT. Now it simply becomes part of the assessment system."

It also gives states the ability to set targets on the amount of time spent on testing.

3. Multiple Measures

ESSA also opens the door for other forms of assessment instead of a snapshot test score. Seven states will be able to apply to develop pilots of innovative assessment programs that can use a variety of indicators to show how a student is performing. Multiple measures of proficiency can include projects, portfolios and other locally designed formative assessments that, along with the standardized tests, create a summative score for a student.

Fewer, more forgiving consequences for poor test taking is an aspect of ESSA that Rebecca Lippy in Maryland will eagerly embrace.

"A lot of my students aren't good test takers, and a test score doesn't give an accurate picture of what they can do," she says. "I spend far too much time teaching them how to take a test, explaining what Part A and Part B is, and so on, and we all know that isn't good instruction."

On the other hand, her students excel when working on projects and she says their level of engagement, motivation and achievement is much more authentic.

"It would make a major difference if I could have input on the tests my students take and how they're learning is assessed," she says.

Assessments should inform instruction, Lippy says, not punish students or educators.

That's exactly what a pilot program in New Hampshire is doing, which is why NEA supports it as a model for other states who may want to be a part of the ESSA pilot. The Performance Assessment of Competency Education (PACE) replaces multiple-choice questions for more meaningful tasks that encourage students to apply what they have learned in sophisticated ways and to use critical thinking and problem solving skills. For example, middle school students could turn in research papers showing they know how to analyze and present information from many sources for English assessments. Fourth-graders might design and cost out a new park for a math assessment.

For the past few years, educators from many New Hampshire districts have been at the table helping to develop assessment systems, ensuring that educators, the people who know their students best, are creating the content. The assessments are intended to be locally designed and controlled and therefore could reduce the amount of student testing while making it more meaningful.

"We hear about over-testing because we really have two accountability systems," New Hampshire Department of Education Deputy Commissioner Paul Leather said in a statement. "The state system is required by federal law but may not help us improve teaching and learning. Schools administer their own tests for that. The PACE pilot brings those together and reduces the testing needed."

With these assessments, New Hampshire's system of competency based learning will show mastery and growth more accurately than a single end of year exam or state assessment. In this system, students only move up a grade after they've mastered the defined skills for each grade level.

"We use New Hampshire as an example of how to do assessment right," says Foley. "It represents a better picture of student growth and includes critical educator input."

4. Measuring Growth Rather than Proficiency

In ESSA there is a new focus on demonstrating student growth.

"For example, if you start at 40 and make it to 79, that's huge growth and a student should be recognized for that, even if the cut score is 80" says Foley. "It's getting away from the one day test snapshot and instead will pull together academic indicators that reflect the whole student, and the accomplishments and growth that student has made."

This is especially important for students with disabilities, English-language learners (ELLs), and at-risk students, and it flows into multiple measures to show student growth, which is a more appropriate way to determine how well students are doing and the progress they've made.

"Assessments should be designed to improve and inform instruction rather than determining that a teacher is not doing their job well because some students didn't make the cut score," Foley says. "Growth is what it's important and the new law highlights that."

5. Highlighting Achievement Gaps Without Punishing Underserved Students

One positive aspect that came out of NCLB was that it highlighted achievement gaps among subgroups of students, and ESSA will continue to do so. There will still be reporting requirements to disaggregate data for five subgroups of students based on race, income, special education, ELLs, and migrant status. Results from the assessments have to be disaggregated by these subgroups and if they aren't performing well, ESSA holds schools accountable and requires that they provide interventions. But gone are the days of closing schools that fail to make AYP in some districts with high populations of at-risk students.

6. Opting-Out and 95 Percent Participation Rate

Even though NCLB mandated 17 federally required tests, the high stakes attached to them led states and districts to start administering multiple interim benchmark tests to see how well students would do on the federal tests. Then there were more tests if those test results were too low, and so on. Parents finally got fed up with the testing mania and launched an opt-out movement. They kept their kids home on test days to protest the overuse and misuse of test scores, and as a result, many districts in states across the country didn't meet the 95 percent participation requirement and suffered the consequences.

What will happen to the opt-out movement going forward remains to be seen. While ESSA recognizes that families can refuse testing if a state has an opt-out law, like Oregon, it still mandates a 95 percent participation rate. It's up to the states to decide what to do if that rate isn't met, but the law is unclear as to what, if any, those consequences may be.

The Road Ahead

The focus now is on implementation as states begin to write their state plans, and NEA is encouraging state affiliates to secure a seat at the table and to collaborate, and partner, with state legislators, parents, school boards, superintendents and bargaining teams to make sure implementation goes smoothly and that educators have a strong voice in the process.

"Now is an opportune time for NEA members to truly make their voices heard," says Foley.
This is a first in a series on changes ESSA will bring to public education. You can also find out more about the law at nea.org/essabegins. Photo: iStock

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Six Ways ESSA Will Improve Assessments - NEA Today

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Standardized testing has become so ingrained into her school year that Rebecca Lippy, a fifth-grade teacher at Maryland City Elementary School in Laurel, Maryland, has a hard time imagining how the new Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which has replaced No Child Left Behind, is going to make a difference in her classroom.

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Under ESSA schools are entitled to claim funding is their school is labeled as low-performing schools. Schools receiving this fund are labeled as Title 1 schools and by 2020 this fund is set to increase to $16.2 billion. the funding is meant to close the achievement gap by helping the students who are most academically at risk through direct student services.

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Under NCLB Standardized testing were high-Stake tests. these tests would evaluate teachers and schools. aside from evaluations, the test scores would determine the funding received by schools and administrators. Along these, the possibility of school closure also made standardized testing really high-risk test on both teachers and students. for the students these test often either made the students or ended the students.
Under ESSA, schools are still to assess their students progress annually, there by limiting over testing in students. tests themselves can change due toe ESSA, since they do not have to use state tests for their assessment; they can use other commonly known tests such as SATs and ACTs. Testing is also now doable in computer devices. Although testing is still challenging, it is a step forward when it comes to accountabilit

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5 Ways ESSA Impacts Standardized Testing

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One of the biggest complaints about NCLB was the test-and-punish nature of the law. Read about how ESSA could change that.