Thread: "Common Core" And The All-Too-Common Tendencies Of Heavy-Handed Government

Ron Paul Curriculum: Opt-Out of Common Core - Opt-In to Home Education – K Through 5 is FREE! : Freedom Outpost http://ow.ly/ylF74



Ron Paul Curriculum: Opt-Out of Common Core - Opt-In to Home Education – K Through 5 is FREE! - Freedom Outpost
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Oklahoma recently took action to protect the state's children from the federal education bureaucracy by withdrawing from Common Core. Common Core is the latest attempt to bribe states, with money taken from the American people, into adopting a curriculum developed by federal bureaucrats and education "experts." In exchange for federal funds, states must change their …


Ron Paul Curriculum: Opt-Out of Common Core - Opt-In to Home Education – K Through 5 is FREE!

Ron Paul June 23, 2014
5 Comments


Oklahoma recently took action to protect the state's children from the federal education bureaucracy by withdrawing from Common Core. Common Core is the latest attempt to bribe states, with money taken from the American people, into adopting a curriculum developed by federal bureaucrats and education "experts." In exchange for federal funds, states must change their curriculum by, for example, replacing traditional mathematics with "reform math." Reform math turns real mathematics on its head by focusing on "abstract thinking" instead of traditional concepts like addition and subtraction. Schools must also replace classic works of literature with "informational" texts, such as studies by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. Those poor kids!

Oklahoma will likely not be the last state to explicitly ban Common Core, as grassroots opposition to this latest federal education "reform" scheme continues to grow. While "reform math" and the use of "informational" texts grab headlines and fuel the outrage behind this movement, they are just symptoms of the problem, not the cause. The devil with Common Core lies not in its details, but in its underlying principle. That principle is that that DC-based central planners can develop a curriculum suitable for every student. The idea that government "experts" can centrally plan a nation's educational system is just as flawed as the idea that government can centrally plan the economy.

One major flaw in a curriculum designed by central planners for use by all students is that it will likely not be academically rigorous enough to meet the needs of college-bound students. Yet at the same time, "one-size-fits-all" curricula like Common Core offer little to meet the needs of students interested in technical or vocational education opportunities.

Growing dissatisfaction with Common Core and other centralized education schemes is leading an increasing number of parents to pursue alternatives such as homeschooling. Throughout my congressional career I was a defender of homeschooling. Now that I am out of Congress, I have expanded my work with homeschoolers through my Ron Paul Curriculum. The curriculum provides students with a rigorous education in history, math, English, foreign languages, and other subjects. While the curriculum is designed to prepare students for college-level work, students not interested in pursuing a traditional four-year college degree will also benefit.

The curriculum features three tracks: natural science/math, social sciences/humanities, and business. Students may also take courses in personal finance and public speaking. The curriculum avoids the ideological biases common in public schools; for example, the government and history sections of the curriculum emphasize Austrian economics, libertarian political theory, and the history of liberty.

Students can use the student discussion forums to interact with, learn from, and teach their peers.

One unique feature of the curriculum is that it gives students the opportunity to start their own Internet-based businesses.

The curriculum is free for students from kindergarten through fifth grade. Families above the fifth grade pay $250 a year, plus $50 per course. However, for the next three months, the Ron Paul Curriculum is offering -- for non-members only -- an online summer school refresher program for students above the fifth grade. For just $25 students can access the curriculum for three months. This is an excellent opportunity for parents to see if my curriculum meets their child's needs.

If you are a parent dissatisfied with existing education options, I hope you will take advantage of the Ron Paul Curriculum's summer refresher program and consider opting out of Common Core and opting in to the Ron Paul Curriculum.

For information on the curriculum please see here.


Read more at http://freedomoutpost.com/2014/06/ro...P4z188R1jUx.99

The Common Core Face-off: Hiding the Truth About School Choice and Charter Schools
http://freedomoutpost.com/2014/06/th...arter-schools/


The Common Core Face-off: Hiding the Truth About School Choice and Charter Schools - Freedom Outpost
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"Those who have the privilege to know, have the duty to act." Albert Einstein Obama and 'Conservative' Groups Use Bait and Switch Tactics. They are using the momentum against Common Core to complete and further their agenda—"Choice" and Charter Schools. The truth has uneasy consequences. 'Conservatives' and Republicans are revealing their so-called "Choice Plan" that …

The Common Core Face-off: Hiding the Truth About School Choice and Charter Schools

Anita B. Hoge 1 hour ago

"Those who have the privilege to know, have the duty to act." Albert Einstein

Obama and 'Conservative' Groups Use Bait and Switch Tactics. They are using the momentum against Common Core to complete and further their agenda—"Choice" and Charter Schools.
The truth has uneasy consequences. 'Conservatives' and Republicans are revealing their so-called "Choice Plan" that mimics the Obama-Duncan Plan. In an article posted by the 'conservative' organization FreedomWorks, their entire proposed controversial agenda for "choice" in education demands rebuttal, discussion and dissection. The Einstein quote at the top of this article validates my decision to act on current documentation, explaining to the American people the danger that these 'conservative groups' represent to parents when they demand "choice."
Republican Governors who say that Common Core is gone are using fraud and deception to further their cause. Their cause is government-controlled, taxpayer-funded "choice" and charter schools. Republicans are now conveniently using the slogan "No Common Core" as a litmus test—a popular hot button that will cue the Fall elections. But, are citizens and parents aware of where that path will take us? For example, see the following quote:

Common Core has emerged as the newest Republican litmus test for gauging candidates' conservative bona fides, and experts say the controversial national education [Common Core] standard will help shape elections from school boards to the White House for the foreseeable future.

This is the agenda that was divulged by FreedomWorks:

A draft action plan by the advocacy group FreedomWorks lays out the effort as a series of stepping stones: First, mobilize to strike down the Common Core. Then push to expand school choice by offering parents tax credits or vouchers to help pay tuition at private and religious schools. Next, rally the troops to abolish the U.S. Department of Education. Then it's on to eliminating teacher tenure.

Let me explain these real issues:
The 'Anti-Common Core Movement' is clouding the real issue. While states are thinking they have struck down Common Core, Obama is using the ESEA Flexibility Waivers to hide his real agenda—to Continue Common Core. Many 'conservatives' are—wittingly or unwittingly—helping Obama's cause.

The move to "Strike Down Common Core" is a fake. It is a sophisticated machination to masquerade the real agenda embraced by 'conservative' groups who are working in tandem with the Obama Administration. "Race to the Top" and the Common Core Copyright made up the 'foot in the door' for standardizing the 50-state strategy. This was the first step towards nationalizing education—with national standards, a national test, and moving toward a national curriculum. Parents against Common Core are being used, especially by directing them to a new, easy answer to sidestep Common Core, i.e., government-controlled "choice."
'Conservative' groups have told parents they can save their children from the federal government by supporting this "choice." Little do these 'new-to-the-system' parents realize that they are being set up for a trap. Choice is that trap, and charter schools are right behind, for the bigger trap agenda. When this agenda becomes fully operational, parents will actually lose their voice. They will lose their vote in our representative form of government. There will be no true representation. The word "accountability" has meaning; it means being in compliance to federal law. You know, the federal strings attached to federal money. This fake "choice" is attached to federal strings.
What happens with Common Core? College and Career Ready Standards, or Workforce Readiness Skills, in a standards-based system will identify your child to the federal government as an individual future global worker. It doesn't matter what name the standards use—it is within the power of the federal government to access your individual child through these individual standards. This plan was laid out by the U.S. Department of Labor in the Secretary's Commission for Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS) report way back in 1992. Obama has set out his plan through "Race to the Top," his plan to nationalize education. This is also hidden in the ESEA Flexibility Waiver, called Title I (explained below). Here is the hard part for people to understand—the fact is that this same plan was also once called the Reagan Plan, the Clinton Plan, the Bush Plan, and the Romney Plan. Romney called for using Title I funds and IDEA, which is Special Education, the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act for school "choice."
Here is the plan, or let's call it "The Big Picture":
Individual standards are to be met by individual students, taught by individual teachers. Individual students must be taught with validated—approved and certified--curriculum. All three entities are controlled through "accountability"—the federal test. This triad--controlled standards, controlled teachers, and controlled curriculum--is the plan.
This 3-faceted plan controls the outcome—your child or student. The 'Conservatives'' plan is to fund individual children wherever they go to school, so this "choice" money "follows the child" and extends the accountability even to private and religious schools.
Both the Liberal and Conservative plans take advantage (profit from) the money-making schemes that result from the expansion of for-profit charter schools. Both sides of the political spectrum have plans that converge. They all want the same results—nationalizing education with federal control of ALL children, ALL teachers, ALL curriculum, and ALL schools or "knowledge-dispensing centers." Oh, and by the way, they want your local tax base, too.
Here is how this plan will work:
It is all about Title I

The Obama Administration has given states ESEA
Flexibility Waivers to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), which is Bush's No Child Left Behind legislation. ALL ESEA Flex Waivers require College and Career Ready Standards. What we have seen so far is deceptive. A state will withdraw from the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), the copyright for Common Core, and then align Common Core into its own state standards when accepting the waiver.
But, parents must realize that Common Core has been transformed with a new name. The state will still conform to College and Career Ready Standards mandated by "Race to the Top" (RTTTT) funding, but further explained in these flexibility waivers. Particularly, these standards must go beyond language arts and math toward workforce readiness skills, which originally started as Common Core. Sometimes a state will include P20W, pre-natal through age 20, standards into the workforce training, expanding the K-12 agenda. (See, for example, "Oregon's Common Core Goes P-20": http://watchdogwire.com/northwest/20...goes-prenatal/ and Kentucky, too: http://p20.education.uky.edu/.)
NOTE: The following pilot states—Ohio, Kentucky, Maine, West Virginia, Wisconsin, New York, New Hampshire, and Oregon—are redesigning their educational systems to correlate with federal standards called Innovation Lab Network, funded by the international Organization of Economic and Cultural Development (OECD), Lumina Foundation, and Chief State School Officers (CCSSO). CCSSO is the group that copyrighted the Common Core Standards along with the National Governors Association.
Oklahoma's passage of House Bill 3399, that supposedly removed Common Core Standards, stated this in their bill:

Upon the effective date of this act, the State Board of Education shall seek certification from the State Regents for Higher Education that the subject matter standards for English Language Arts and Mathematics which were in place prior to the revisions adopted by the Board in June 2010 are college-and career-ready as defined in the Federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) Flexibility document issued by the United States Department of Education.... [emphasis added]

Oh no! The legislature put Common Core into law through their Flex Waiver! Governor Fallin is the Chairman of the National Governors Association (the other group that copyrighted the Common Core Standards). Oklahoma now calls their standards "Oklahoma Academic Standards," and on the front of their Flex Waiver called their agenda "C3, College, Career, Citizenship Standards"—exactly the same as the CCSSO were calling it--to expand the standards to include dispositions, or attitudinal and value standards. We can assume that these standards will include testing and interventions in the non-cognitive domain.
Indiana's supposed departure from Common Core is referred to as the "grand deception." Indiana's HB 1427 states:

Provides that the state board shall implement educational standards that use the common core standards as the base model for academic standards to the extent necessary to comply with federal standards to receive a Flexibility Waiver.

[emphasis added]
South Carolina's bill, H3893, to stop Common Core and the Smarter Balanced Test states:

The summative assessment must assess students in English/language arts and mathematics, including those students as required by the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and by Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. For purposes of this subsection, 'English/language arts' includes English, reading, and writing skills as required by existing state standards. [emphasis added]

Existing state standards? You guessed it! Common Core. Do you see a pattern here? This has happened in several states where Common Core is most controversial. While parents believe Common Core is gone, little do they know those standards were just embedded in the ESEA Title I Flexibility Waivers signed by your state's secretary or superintendent of education. Unfortunately, Oklahoma, Indiana, and South Carolina have taken the bait. Common Core is still there, with other new forceful accountability measures, like Value Added Models (VAM), to be sure teachers are teaching Common Core, and interventions using special education funds from the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) called "Response to Intervention." RtI is used for ALL students to make sure they are covered by IDEA to meet Common Core Standards.
The Plan to Use Title I to Expand School Choice to Private and Religious schools

How will EVERY child become Title I? President Johnson's "War on Poverty" gave schools funding, called ESEA Title I, to help those schools where there were concentrations of students who were poor. Interestingly enough, the term was "educationally deprived." So, the issue with the ESEA Flexibility Waiver is that the poverty guidelines were removed. This means that children who qualified for free and reduced lunches, where a school had to have 40% of students that qualified under poverty guidelines, are now in a school where that requirement is reduced to "0%." This means ALL individual children in an entire school can receive federal ESEA Title I funds for EVERY child: the funds "follow the child."
This means that a child is considered "educationally deprived" if he/she does not meet standards. Interestingly, the 'Conservative' organization American Legislative Exchange Council, (ALEC) just released model legislation for choice and charter schools for every state in the country. They refer to students not meeting standards with the term "academically disadvantaged." This is what is needed to move forward with federal "choice." EVERY child must be identified for "choice" funds, no matter where they go to school. Obama has done this through the ESEA Flexibility Waiver.
Now that ALL children in public school are Title I, the Republicans can take over from here. They want "choice" [those Title I funds] for EVERY student who goes to private and religious schools, too! This is a terrible bait and switch deception for those parents and citizens who think that choice means freedom of choice for private and religious education! This is not freedom, nor true choice.
Where is the federal "choice" agenda now? ESEA Re-authorization Is held up by Senator Reid... at the moment.
The Re-authorization of ESEA is the bill in Congress that changes how funding will now follow the child. The Republicans in the House of Representatives added "choice" amendments to the ESEA Re-authorization in HR 5 that can "follow the child" with Title I funds into any private or religious school. This passed the House in July of 2013. The Democrats, on the Senate side, voted to have SB 1094 come out of committee, but it has not been brought up for an entire Senate vote. SB 1094 wants Title I funds to follow the child to any public or charter school. But, Obama's Flexibility Waivers are doing most of that job already without the passage of the Re-authorization of ESEA legislation. Obama supports "choice" in the Flexibility Waivers in public schools. The passage of the entire ESEA package (with Republican amendments in conference committee using federal "choice" funding) will allow federal Title I funds to be attached to your child, to have the "choice" to go to any school, anywhere. This is the legislation that Obama and the 'Conservative' groups want to pass for federal "choice" to become a reality.
WARNING! There are strings attached! Title I Choice funds can be connected to your child to go to any charter, private or religious school you choose. Obama wants "equity" in education. This means the same amount of money for every child with federal accountability strings attached. The compromise will be "choice" for everyone, potentially even home schoolers. There will be no differences in schools anywhere, nationalizing education in the United States through "choice" and Common Core—all will have to "drink the Kool-Aid." That's what "equity in education" means. All schools will become government schools under the Re-authorization of ESEA. You get "choice." But they control all the schools!


Here is the
Set-up

Let's say the Re-authorization of ESEA is passed with the "choice" amendments. Your child has already been identified by the national database through the state longitudinal data system. Your child has been identified for funding under Title I because of the Flex Waiver. Now, with this "choice" the Title I funds will "follow" your child to whichever school you choose.
Here is an example of what can happen once your child has the "choice" funds in his/her backpack, with their name allotted to the scholarship, and you (the parent) decide to use this "choice" funding to send your child to Immaculate Conception Catholic School in Washington, Pennsylvania. This school will be mandated by federal law to comply with ESEA, better known as Common Core. This will be disguised as academic standards or College and Career Ready Standards (CCRS). Under this sort of "choice," there can be no discrimination for this Catholic school to turn down a student. [NOTE: This changes the hope that a private school can bypass this issue by just refusing federal funding. The private school must refuse the child. This is where discrimination comes into play.] So, Immaculate Conception must enroll your child. This would be the same for any private school or religious school.
Immaculate Conception will be mandated to administer the federal test. This national test will also evaluate the teachers. If Immaculate Conception School is not teaching Common Core, they will be targeted as a priority or focus school to be brought into compliance with the law. This will be the demise of "private" in your group of "choice" schools. This will be the end of truly private education in America, because your private or religious school just became a government school—it must use the standards passed in your state (Common Core warmed over), and take the assessment aligned to the national curriculum and national test. All schools become government schools with "choice."
Is This the End of Public Schools?

Now, what happens to the old public school that your child just left? Your old public school will struggle. Your local district must pay for at least 50% of your child's stipend or scholarship with taxes collected locally so that your child can go to another school. Your federal Title I "Choice" fund pays the other 50%. Your public school loses 100% of funding for every student who leaves to go to a "choice" school. Your public school system locally will collapse, because there will not be enough money in the budget to support your community's school. Plus, your tax money will be following students everywhere, even across state lines.
Your locally elected school directors will be fired or retired. What happens to "voting" for locally elected representatives? What happens to your tax base, to property taxes that were collected to run your neighborhood school? Where will property taxes go if there are no public schools? What happens to wealthier districts if funding for students becomes equalized? This is the "punch in the gut" that Secretary Duncan was talking about when he chastised soccer moms that were against Common Core.
Meanwhile, everyone is fiddling around with Common Core, states are taking the caps off the number of charter schools, expanding them, closing down public schools, and sometimes transforming a public school into a charter school. Parent trigger bills are allowing parents to set up charter schools. Charter schools are not private schools. Charters are public schools. They have with no elected boards, but they do have access to public funds.
A June 24, 2014 article in the Detroit Free Press explains the powerless authority of a Charter School Board when told, "none of the board's business" as to how the school was run.

"In its investigation into how Michigan's charter schools perform and spend nearly $1 billion a year in taxpayer dollars, the Free Press found board members who were kept clueless by their management companies about school budgets or threatened and removed by a school's authorizer when they tried to exercise the responsibilities that come with their oath of office. Board members removed by an authorizer have no recourse in Michigan."

"There have been board members who have basically said, 'We tried to make changes, we tried to instill our rights as board members overseeing a public school' and were essentially told to back off," said Casandra Ulbrich, vice president of the state Board of Education, which sets education policy and advises lawmakers. "You have to question who's really running the show here because technically and legally, it's supposed to be the board." In traditional school districts, with elected boards, members can't be removed for asking tough questions. Voters get to decide whether to re-elect a board member." [emphases mine]

By supporting the Common Core agenda you have just agreed to diminish our American representative form of government by supporting "choice" and charter schools. Taxation without representation. Will taxes be centralized or regionalized toward a central base? Will the people have any power or voice to change this system?
So, think again. "What is your choice?" Charter schools, private schools, religious schools, and remaining public schools—all conforming to the ESEA federal law with Common Core embedded in the standards. Your state will continue to reduce caps on charter schools, and some public schools will become community "hub centers" or school-based clinics. And lest you forget, SB 1094 also changed the definition of a "Family Member." You, the parent are demoted to a "partner" who is responsible for your child along with many "other" government officials. Please do an Internet search for the definition of partnership. You won't like it when the government takes away your authority as a parent, your voice and your representative voting power is lost forever and your child belongs to the state, with reduced in authority to "partner." And if your child moves to another city or state to go to a school more suited to his/her abilities and can produce more "human capital" from your child, who will "partner" with him/her there?
Will these 'Conservative' groups and Obama give you the straight talk about ESEA and ESEA Flexibility Waivers? Will they tell you the truth about what will happen to your private, Catholic, or Christian school with federal "choice"? No! They are NOT talking about it! They continue to insist that "choice" is the answer. Keep in mind that there is a profit motive for many of these groups to continue to advocate this phony "choice."
What Will Happen if the U.S. Department of Education is Abolished?

So, what about abolishing the U.S. Department of Education? Watch the switcheroo!
Who better to monitor human capital than the U.S. Department of Labor? Plus, another aspect of SB 1094 (Re-authorization of ESEA) is that they want a national assessment board that monitors compliance to the national test, most likely the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Well, this "appointed" commission was the plan all along, too.
The Gordon Commission has already been set up by Obama and the Educational Testing Service (ETS),the contractor for NAEP, which calls for an unelected board to manage the national test. Want to talk about top down control? Why not just use the U.S. Department of Labor to monitor the "human capital" (your child's economic value to the state) that is being processed by all schools in America? The national testing, along with the National Center of Education Statistics (NCES), will monitor compliance from the national database on ALL aspects of education.
Who needs the U.S. Department of Education? Who needs state control of funding when Title I federal funds "follow the child" and do NOT pass through state government? Who needs locally elected school boards when public schools fail?
CEO Reed Hastings of Netflix, who is a big charter school supporter and an investor in the Rocketship Education charter school network, agrees. His big idea is to "kill" elected school boards. "At a meeting of the California Charter Schools Association on March 4, he said in a keynote speech that the problem with public schools is that they are governed by elected local school boards."
Effectively, this charter school system destroys representative government.
Why the System Needs Traditional Teachers Out of the Way

Traditional teachers must be gotten rid of. The Vergara case in Los Angeles ruled teacher tenure unconstitutional, and it serves as the precedent doing away with teacher tenure. Soon you will see lawsuits erupting all over the country against teacher tenure with the Obama gang members presiding.
Teachers unions are girding for a tough fight to defend tenure laws against a coming blitz of lawsuits — and an all-out public relations campaign led by former aides to President Barack Obama.
But, wait a minute! Wasn't that the so-called 'conservative' FreedomWorks agenda? So, now you know the rest of the story. Who is on whose side?
Teachers will be manipulated to leave the education system through the Value-Added Measurement Model (VAMM) incorporated into the ESEA Fexibility Waiver. Teachers will be evaluated by how their students score on the national test. Teachers MUST teach to the test, and must be evaluated with the Charlotte Danielson Evaluation, spelled out in the Flex Waivers. [NOTE: Charlotte Danielson was an official with the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory during development of the original Course Goals Collection, the forerunner of Outcome-Based Education and the Common Core.] All curriculum used will be developed with total alignment to the standards aligned system (SAS), which matches curriculum, teaching, and testing to the standards. Teachers must perform and teach the standards, period.
Removing teacher tenure easily allows traditional teachers who know what is best for children, to be replaced if they do not conform to the Common Core agenda. The Fexibility Waiver is very clear about replacing the principals and the teachers not in compliance. Young, inexperienced Teach For America members are standing on the sidelines ready to jump at the chance to replace traditional teachers. Eager and committed, they will comply with the plan.
All barriers are now removed for federal takeover.
A Little Background on Choice

When the controversy exploded in the 1990's over Outcome Based Education (OBE), the education bureaucrats did not expect the explosion of fury from parents against OBE and the subjective learning outcomes that were trying to be placed in every state at that time. OBE failed. The bureaucrats have gotten smarter, but very little else has changed.
Copyright the standards, call them academic, and align them to "Race to the Top" funds so every state could be the same. Change Title I in ESEA for every child to be funded the same, equity in education. Test every child to see where their weaknesses are in meeting standards that were expanded to values and attitudes. Then use Special Ed funds for remediation or intervention to meet those standards. Monitor and force teachers to teach the standards, and implement choice to throw the net over everyone. Here was the sentiment then, as it is now:
"TO OBE OR NOT TO OBE?" WAS THE QUESTION POSED BY MARJORIE LEDELL, ASSOCIATE of William Spady's in his High Success Network in her article for Educational
Leadership's January 1994 issue. On page 18 of her article we read the following:

Finally, raise the real issue and depend on democracy. Don't let "to OBE (common core) or Not to OBE (common core)" or "to implement or not implement efforts to improve student learning" cloud the overdue national debate about whether public education should exist or be replaced with publicly funded private education.
[Emphasis added. OBE quote taken from The Deliberate Dumbing Down of Americaby Charlotte T. Iserbyt.]

Sorry, FreedomWorks. Freedom doesn't work this way.
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Read more at http://freedomoutpost.com/2014/06/th...gvR8HWouzGA.99

These are our children it is up to us to teach them, not the government...

June 2014
Growing Rejection of Common Core

The most controversial current issue in education today is clearly Common Core. It’s being more hotly debated than bullying, zero tolerance, sex ed, abortion, or even school lunches.
Common Core is the title of a new set of standards that the Obama Administration has been trying to force the states to use. Even before the standards were written, 45 states and the District of Columbia signed on, encouraged by inducements of federal funds. The principal outliers are Texas, Alaska, Nebraska, and Virginia.
Now that parents and teachers are finding out what is commanded by Common Core standards and what is being taught by “Common Core-aligned” materials, moms and teachers are raising a ruckus to try to get their states to repeal their state’s involvement. Many are demanding that their state withdraw altogether from Common Core, principally because they believe it is a takeover by the Obama Administration of all that kids are taught and not taught.
The backlash against Common Core has developed into a potent political force. About 100 bills have been introduced into various state legislatures to cancel, stop or slow down Common Core requirements.
Indiana broke the ice on March 23, becoming the first state to pass an anti-Common Core law. It strikes out references to Common Core in the law and requires the state board of education to maintain Indiana’s sovereignty while complying with federal standards.
When Indiana Governor Mike Pence signed this legislation that opted his state out of Common Core standards, he said, “I believe our students are best served when decisions about education are made at the state and local level.”
The Indiana bill was introduced as a straight repeal of Common Core, but it ended up keeping so many Common Core requirements that the original sponsor of the bill, Senator Scott Schneider, pulled his name off the bill.
The game of some people, obviously, is to pass standards that are nearly identical to Common Core but under a different name, because the name itself has become toxic. And states are always solicitous to maintain their flow of federal funds, which the Obama Administration uses as bribes or threats.
The second state that went public against Common Core was South Carolina. On May 30, Governor Nikki Haley signed a bill abolishing Common Core standards in that state beginning in 2015.
Legislators were responding to constituent complaints that Common Core introduces frivolous and illogical teaching techniques to no apparent purpose, while imposing new standards that are not meaningful improvements, and ends up being a top-down, one-size-fits-all approach.
Parents won a remarkable victory when the Oklahoma Legislature repealed use of Common Core by the overwhelming bipartisan vote of 71 to 18 in the House and 31 to 10 in the Senate, and replaced it with academic standards written by Oklahoma. After receiving an estimated 20,000 phone calls in support of the repeal, Governor Mary Fallin signed the repeal into law on June 5.
This law directs the State Board of Education to create new more rigorous standards by August of next year. The State Regents for Higher Education, the State Board of Career and Technology Education, and the Oklahoma Department of Commerce will evaluate the newly written standards to make sure they truly make students “college and career ready.”
Governor Fallin’s message in signing the repeal of Common Core was blunt in explaining what is wrong with Common Core. She wrote, “President Obama and Washington bureaucrats have usurped Common Core in an attempt to influence state education standards. Common Core is now widely regarded as the President’s plan to establish federal control of curricula, testing and teaching strategies.”
Governor Fallin’s message reminded us that “Citizens, parents, educators and legislators . . . have expressed fear that adopting Common Core gives up local control of Oklahoma’s public schools.” We congratulate Oklahoma’s Governor for having the courage to stop the well-financed plan to railroad Oklahoma’s public schools into kowtowing to federal control.
From the start, Common Core has been ballyhooed as a state-led (not federal) initiative that each state could choose to voluntarily adopt. But, as the Governor wrote, “The words ‘Common Core’ in Oklahoma are now so divisive that they have become a distraction that interferes with our mission of providing the best education possible for our children.”
Like most leftwingers, when Education Secretary Arne Duncan was besieged on all sides by Common Core critics, he played the race card, for which he later had to apologize. He accused opponents of Common Core of just being “white suburban moms.”
Duncan should have read the New York Times, which published a picture of both white and African-American moms protesting Common Core, wearing signs that said “My child is not common.” Parents nationwide are saying No to Common Core.
My Child Is Not Common


“My Child Is Not Common” are the words on the attention-getting signs carried by a group of white and African-American mothers protesting the adoption of the aggressively promoted Common Core standards. Common Core is scheduled to take over the testing of all U.S. kids, pre-K to 12, but parents are saying “no way” in every way they can.
Common Core was rapidly adopted by 45 states and the District of Columbia before any read the standards. Four states rejected it from the outset: Alaska, Nebraska, Texas and Virginia.
Those of us who have been speaking and writing against national control of education for years are amazed at the way parents are coming out of their kitchens to protest. None of the previous attempts by the progressives to nationalize public school curriculum created anything like this kind of grassroots uprising.
Bad education fads started some fifty years ago with Whole Language, which cheated generations of school kids out of learning how to read English by phonics. Call the roll of the fads that followed: Values Clarification, Goals 2000, Outcome-Based Education, School-Based Clinics, Sex Ed, Suicide Ed, Self-Esteem Ed, New Math, History Standards, School to Work, Race to the Top, and No Child Left Behind.
Our powerful and erudite articles against all those fads never aroused the angst caused by Common Core. Those of us who for years have been criticizing the mistaken courses that kept kids from learning are flabbergasted at what we see erupting among the grassroots.
Former Education Commissioner Robert Scott was the Texas official who articulated that state’s rejection of Common Core. He pointed out how the feds tried to bribe Texas into going along.
Scott said, “We said no to Common Core and they said, ‘you want Race to the Top money?’ That was $700 million. They said, ‘do it.’ Well, we still said, no thanks. The feds also asked if Texas wanted a No Child Left Behind waiver and again, Texas said no.”
Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal recently came out with a strong statement against Common Core: “As we have seen in Obamacare, President Obama’s Washington believes it knows better than the peasants in the states. But centralized planning didn’t work in Russia, it’s not working with our health care system, and it won’t work in education.”
No wonder the grassroots have dubbed Common Core Obamacore. That’s a play on the Obamacare health plan that is so widely despised.
Indiana became the first state to opt out when its Senate voted 35-13 to withdraw Indiana from Common Core standards on March 12, 2014. But Indiana Governor Mike Pence appears to have backtracked and just renamed it, a bureaucratic trick that doesn’t fool either side, and is a disappointment to the Indiana moms who started the national revolt against Common Core.
Pence’s action is particularly baffling because pre-Common Core Indiana was known to have one of the highest standards of all the fifty states. Hillsdale College professor Terrence Moore said that Common Core’s English standards deserve an “F” and even omits teaching phonics, and Stanford University math professor James Milgram, who served on the Common Core math validation committee, charged that the math standards are so “incomprehensible” and complicated that they should be called “bizarre.”
As Common Core keeps plodding right ahead in most states, parents are finding plenty to criticize in the curriculum. Parents think that the math questions children bring home are incomprehensible and stupid. New York parents are objecting to the fact that Common Core social studies standards say America is founded on the democratic principles of equality, fairness and respect for authority but don’t mention liberty, and Alabama parents are objecting to the pornography in assigned readings.
There’s no mention of education in the U.S. Constitution because the Founding Fathers believed education is a parental and a state issue. Our laws still reflect that assumption, but that concept has been widely violated in recent years by the flow of federal money with strings attached.
Parents are also suspicious of the gigantic amount of money that is being spent to promote the use of Common Core-aligned books and teacher training. Emeritus Professor Jack Hassard of Georgia State University estimates that billionaire Bill Gates has spent $2.3 billion on Common Core.
Some say Gates is a promoter of “global sameness of education as defined by UNESCO and the United Nations.” Gates has expressed agreement with UN policies that many Americans oppose such as Agenda 21, which promotes global governance at the expense of private property and national sovereignty.
Window Into the Future

The problems with the U.S. Veterans Administration (VA) giving inferior and delayed care to veterans is a good window into the future of Obamacare. Both the VA and Obamacare suffer the endemic problems of a government-run single-payer system (a.k.a. socialism) — no choice of doctors or hospitals, no insurance companies, broken promises, lengthy waits, and bureaucratic cover-ups.
Before Barack Obama was elected, we were assured by experts writing in the mainstream media that the VA was a U.S. health care leader and a model for the country. The New York Times oracle Paul Krugman wrote in 2011, “Yes, this is ‘socialized medicine,’ but it works, and suggests what it will take to solve the troubles of U.S. health care more broadly.”
Obama made a lot of big campaign promises about the VA to reassure veterans. The VA scandal is now embarrassing front-page news that he can’t ignore, but he continues to pretend that there is no systemic problem in the VA system.
Now we hear that the VA maintains hidden “wait lists” for at least seven veterans hospitals. That’s exactly what critics of Obamacare predicted will happen with a government-run health care system.
The length of the secret waiting list at the VA system in Arizona is a shocking 1,400 to 1,600 patients and at least 40 veterans have died at the Phoenix VA hospital waiting for a vital treatment. Some VA patients have waited as long as 21 months to see a physician, despite the VA claim that it was meeting its goal to allow a delay of only 14 to 30 days for a patient to be seen.
“Choice” is a favorite word with many liberals, but the VA problems are proving that our choices about medical care are rapidly narrowing. There are fewer plans, and fewer doctors and fewer hospitals in every approved plan.
Some assert that there are more than 344,000 claims for veterans’ care that are waiting to be processed, and it takes an average of 160 days for a veteran to be approved for health benefits. The system has deteriorated so badly that suicides by patients and by staff have become a problem.
We hear that some VA employees maintained secret lists and falsified data in order to conceal the wait times and hide the long delays veterans faced before seeing doctors. Nevertheless, the organization called Openthebooks.com reports that 12,549 bonuses totaling over $8.8 million at seven troubled facilities have been paid out to reward VA employees.
When Barack Obama was a candidate for President in 2008, he made the medical treatment of veterans a big, emotional campaign issue and promised that his administration would address the backlog, greatly improve care, cure “the broken bureaucracy of the VA,” and build “a 21st-century VA.” In fact, the real goal of Obama and Senator Harry Reid has always been to grease the way to impose a universal government-run single-payer health system for all Americans.
Millions of medical records at the Phoenix facility are apparently missing, and the system is reportedly 250,000 pages behind in processing new records. Patients are sometimes referred by the VA to another VA in a different state because of the unavailability of physicians and nurses, who have left the system in droves.
This problem is not limited to one VA hospital in Phoenix but has surfaced in at least 16 states, including Colorado, Florida, Missouri, New Mexico, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, West Virginia and Wyoming. As long as the Obama Administration remains in cover-up mode, there is good reason to think that this denial of care is even more pervasive and worse than so far reported.
Meanwhile, the Obama Administration has refused access for state officials to inspect the records at VA hospitals, even though health care has traditionally been under the purview of state law. When the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration visited VA hospitals to examine records and investigate reports of big delays in care, the Obama Administration told them to get out.
So, look through the window into the future and see the government-run health care that is called Obamacare. The VA problems are exactly where Obamacare is taking Americans because the Democrats’ goal in passing Obamacare was always to take us all into a single-payer system controlled by the federal government, and the VA is precisely the model.
Semicentennial of LBJ’s War on Poverty

This year, the cheerleaders for big government are celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the launching of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. This should be an occasion for mourning, not celebration, because that was the most expensive legislative failure in our history.
Yes, failure. Today we have four million Americans who have been unemployed for more than six months, 49 million Americans living below the poverty line, and 100 million people receiving some form of food aid from the federal government.
Johnson came into power in 1964 on the biggest landslide in U.S. history, and then he brought about the largest expansion of government in our history, surpassing even the expansion of government initiated by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s. Instead of lifting Americans out of poverty, LBJ’s 40 federal programs trapped millions of Americans in poverty and permanent dependency.
Today’s legislative battles — raising the minimum wage, expanding and perpetuating government-financed health care for seniors and the poor, extending long-term unemployment benefits, and big appropriations to the education establishment are all about extending government spending for Johnson’s programs.
LBJ announced his War on Poverty in his 1964 State of the Union address. He then expanded his goal to the Great Society, using the “great” concept 16 times in his commencement speech in May before a crowd of 70,000 at the University of Michigan.
With his insufferable ego, LBJ declared that he planned “to move us not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society.” Johnson summoned his young speechwriter, Richard N. Goodwin, and told him to use the unfinished John F. Kennedy program “as a springboard to take on Congress” and turn it into an “aggressive Johnson program.”
With a super majority of Democrats in Congress and using his famous bullying tactics known as the “Johnson treatment,” LBJ pushed Congress to pass 200 expensive new laws. Key pieces of Great Society legislation were enacted by 1968 and Joseph A. Califano Jr. boasted that “This country is more the country of Lyndon Johnson than any other president.”
These new spending bills included the start of Medicare, Medicaid, direct federal aid to public schools, bilingual education, Head Start, food stamps, vocational education through the Job Corps, urban renewal programs, new spending for the arts and humanities, a giant expansion of immigration, public housing, aid to college students, and handouts to non-commercial TV and radio including PBS and NPR.
LBJ’s pie-in-the sky promises, followed by expansion of the taxpayer spending he rammed through Congress, gave us a dozen years of what we, with hindsight, can see was a massive change in the role of government.
Charles Murray’s influential book Losing Ground showed that the Great Society’s changes actually made the problems of the poor and the disadvantaged worse, not better. The policy of channeling all welfare money to mothers made the father family-provider unnecessary, and thereby broke up millions of intact families.
Unfortunately, most of LBJ’s spending programs survive to this day and continue to rise. The federal government is now five times as big in real dollars as it was in 1964.
LBJ’s Great Society spending was not merely an Obama-style strategy to redistribute the wealth. Johnson’s purpose was to shift power from the states to the federal government, from Congress to executive-branch regulators, and from big-city political machines to Alinsky-style community groups so they could organize and make demands to increase federal control.
For example, federal meddling in public school education, encrusted with lavish federal spending, started with LBJ’s Great Society. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the Higher Education Act were both born in 1965.
Prior to that, the federal powers-that-be never presumed to tell schools what to teach or to bribe them with federal money. The only pre-LBJ money that went to education was the GI bill to help World War II veterans attend college.
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 scrapped our immigration system that had been in place since 1924 and replaced it with admitting large numbers of Latin Americans, Africans and Asians instead of Western Europeans. This greatly increased the number of immigrants with welfare and public education costs.
When LBJ started to hand out the tax-paid goodies, polls reported that a big majority of Americans trusted the federal government to do what is right. But by 1966 the favorable view of Washington declined and kept going down. Reagan wrote in his diary: “I’m trying to undo the ‘Great Society.’ It was LBJ’s war on poverty that led to our present mess.”

http://www.eagleforum.org/publications/psr/june14.html

Common Core Becomes a Nightmare

by Phyllis Schlafly

July 9, 2014

Americans are waking up to how bad Common Core really is for education, but its nightmare does not go away quickly. Liberal education bureaucrats (“educrats”) are now trying to enforce Common Core through the courts, with one lawsuit already filed in Oklahoma, and another likely in Louisiana.
In both states the governors tried to get rid of Common Core, but parents are shocked that it may return by court order as unelected educrats claim they have more power than the state legislature and the governor combined. The Oklahoma legislature approved a law to repeal Common Core and the governor signed it, but now its state board of education has filed a lawsuit to bring it back.


The Washington Post has revealed how Bill Gates used his non-profit foundation to spend hundreds of millions of dollars behind the scenes to force this disaster on the American people. The Gates Foundation doled out a fortune to various education groups, to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and to teachers unions to force Common Core on all students.
A group that received nearly $2 million from the Gates Foundation to help implement Common Core, the National Association of State Boards of Education (NASBE), is the same organization behind the lawsuit to reinstate Common Core in Oklahoma. Joining this effort is a member of the state board of education, which is not elected by the people.
The NASBE is a private group, unaccountable to the public, which received $1,077,960 from the Gates Foundation in 2011 “to build the capacity of State Boards of Education to better position them to achieve full implementation of the Common Core standards.” About two years later the NASBE received another $800,000 “to provide training and information to implement Common Core State Standards” and to help develop it, too.
The lawsuit, which claims that the state constitution does not permit the legislature and governor to repeal Common Core, was filed directly in the Oklahoma supreme court, and there will be no appeal from whatever that court decides. The people of Oklahoma are apparently at the mercy of an unelected state board and its liberal state supreme court, and the U.S. Supreme Court will not get involved in this issue of state law.
Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin signed the bill to repeal Common Core a few weeks before her primary, which she then won in a landslide. But why isn’t she or the legislature doing anything to remove from office the members of the state board of education who refuse to implement the repeal of Common Core?
A similar fiasco is shaping up in Louisiana, where Governor Bobby Jindal has courageously stopped Common Core. Or at least so everyone thought, until the educrats there began planning a lawsuit to defy the governor and impose it anyway.
The Louisiana State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education voted 6-3 to “lawyer up,” as Breitbart.com put it, in order to sue its own governor for withdrawing Louisiana from both Common Core and the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), which controls the testing to implement Common Core.
Governor Jindal pointed out that the state board did not seek competitive bids on the expensive tests for the schools, as is generally required by state law on most contracts in order to save the state as much money as possible. Both the Louisiana state superintendent and the president of its state board of education defiantly predicted that Louisiana would remain in Common Core and its testing for the 2014-2015 school year.
The Obama Administration has reportedly already poured $370 million into developing tests to be forced on the states. But many of the biggest states, including heavily Democratic states such as New York, are reconsidering their participation in the federally funded tests.
New Jersey is now considering pulling out of Common Core, with Governor Chris Christie facing a dilemma that may determine whether he is a viable presidential candidate. Does he stand up for local control over education by stopping Common Core in his state, as Governor Jindal has done in Louisiana, or does Christie try to play both sides of the issue?
Meanwhile, parents in areas already implementing Common Core are discovering that they are unable to help their children solve elementary arithmetic problems. Bizarre, tedious and convoluted methods of teaching children basic arithmetic are causing parents to search on the internet for answers, and some of these parents are turning to homeschooling to escape the madness.
But even homeschooling may not help, if colleges all convert to the new testing standards based on Common Core guidelines. The tests are what drive curricula, and homeschool curricula will need to adapt to the new tests in order for the students to be admitted to college.

---

Further Reading: Common Core

http://www.eagleforum.org/publicatio...nightmare.html

Schools are prisons All parents should watch this

Mark Simser TM






Published on Mar 22, 2014
this is not my video folks, but i dont imagine that buddy will sue me for sharing the truth. peace!

NGA Backs Away from “Radioactive” Common Core

July 15, 2014 | americanprinciplesproject

Breitbart details how the National Governor’s Association, which originally helped develop the Common Core State Standards, is now backing away from them as parents and teachers turn against the controversial standards.

Emmett McGroarty, education director of the American Principles Project, is concerned about federal overreach into education.
“The NGA and many individual governors want to ignore the cold, hard facts,” McGroarty told Breitbart News. “The Framers intended that the governors and state legislatures would protect citizens from federal intrusion so that the people could make their own decisions about important matters like education policy.”
“With respect to the Common Core, many governors – spurred on by the NGA – failed to do this, and in fact the NGA actually invited the federal government to push the standards into the states,” McGroarty explained. “Together, the NGA and those governors cut state legislators and citizens out of the process.”
McGroarty asserts that, because of the failure to include state lawmakers and parents in the process, “the NGA’s Common Core Standards are defective and lock children into a low-quality education.”
“The Common Core initiative is a man-made disaster that arose from a lack of respect for the people, the legislators who represent them, and the constitutional structure intended to protect them,” McGroarty said.
In an ironic twist, leading the states in repealing the Common Core standards, without simply “rebranding” or renaming them, is Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin (R), who also happens to be the chair of the NGA. Oklahoma will not only write its own standards, which the law says must be shown to be sufficiently unlike the Common Core, but has reverted to its former PASS standards for the coming school year.
“Common Core has become a divisive issue in our nation, with the concern that the federal government is trying to mandate standards down to states,” Fallin said Friday. “The governors are listening to their voters and their constituents back home who are concerned about the federal overreach into states, and each governor will do what’s in the best interest of their states.”

Read the full article at Breitbart


National Governors Group Avoids 'Radioactive' Common Core






by Dr. Susan Berry 14 Jul 2014 34 post a comment
The National Governors Association (NGA) owns the copyright – along with the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) – to the Common Core State Standards. When the nationalized standards are mentioned these days, however, many governors would rather change the subject.

In fact, the NGA, holding summer meetings in Nashville, had not even placed the controversial standards on its official agenda, a sign, as the Wall Street Journal states, “the bipartisan idea has become a political minefield.”

Much to the surprise of many Washington, D.C., pundits, the standards, and even the name itself, “Common Core,” have “become, in a sense, radioactive,” said Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad (R), according to the Associated Press.
The governors' association is not taking a position on implementation of the Common Core, though the group was a key player when the standards were developed in 2009.
"I guarantee you there will be a lot of discussion this week about it among individuals and in governors-only meetings in terms of, 'Tell me what you are doing. What's the impact?'" said Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam (R), who has continued his support for the Common Core and joined with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) and U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) in March to promote them.
Indeed, for Republicans, the issue of the Common Core has also been described by former Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) as “toxic,” and has served to separate the GOP establishment, supported by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, from constitutional conservatives who oppose the federal government’s hand in pushing Common Core through President Obama’s Race to the Top (RttT) stimulus program and the promise of relief from federal No Child Left Behind restrictions.
Emmett McGroarty, education director of the American Principles Project, is concerned about federal overreach into education.
"The NGA and many individual governors want to ignore the cold, hard facts,” McGroarty told Breitbart News. “The Framers intended that the governors and state legislatures would protect citizens from federal intrusion so that the people could make their own decisions about important matters like education policy.”
“With respect to the Common Core, many governors – spurred on by the NGA – failed to do this, and in fact the NGA actually invited the federal government to push the standards into the states,” McGroarty explained. “Together, the NGA and those governors cut state legislators and citizens out of the process.”
McGroarty asserts that, because of the failure to include state lawmakers and parents in the process, “the NGA’s Common Core Standards are defective and lock children into a low-quality education.”
“The Common Core initiative is a man-made disaster that arose from a lack of respect for the people, the legislators who represent them, and the constitutional structure intended to protect them," McGroarty said.
In an ironic twist, leading the states in repealing the Common Core standards, without simply “rebranding” or renaming them, is Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin (R), who also happens to be the chair of the NGA. Oklahoma will not only write its own standards, which the law says must be shown to be sufficiently unlike the Common Core, but has reverted to its former PASS standards for the coming school year.
“Common Core has become a divisive issue in our nation, with the concern that the federal government is trying to mandate standards down to states,” Fallin said Friday. “The governors are listening to their voters and their constituents back home who are concerned about the federal overreach into states, and each governor will do what’s in the best interest of their states.”
Though Indiana Gov. Mike Pence (R) was the first of the governors to declare the Common Core repealed in his state, many Hoosier parents have been highly critical of his decision to ignore both them and the advice of standards experts he invited to assist in writing replacement standards. It turns out Pence’s replacement standards are remarkably similar to the Common Core and, in some cases, even inferior.
According to the WSJ, however, Pence, a 2016 presidential hopeful, “rejects” that claim.
South Carolina, led by Gov. Nikki Haley (R), also plans to write its own standards to replace the Common Core, though the nationalized standards will remain in place for the coming school year.
Gov. Bobby Jindal (R), also a 2016 potential presidential hopeful, has taken on his state’s superintendent and state school board president – who have threatened to sue the governor – to remove Louisiana from the PARCC Common Core test consortium, a battle that has demonstrated the power that state boards of education have achieved through the years over state legislatures, local school districts, and parents.
Anna Arthurs, a physician and parent organizer of a grassroots group in Louisiana, said she is not surprised that Common Core has been avoided at the recent NGA meetings.
“It is getting difficult for this D.C.-based trade organization to continue to defend the full initiative associated with these standards,” Arthurs told Breitbart News. “The NGA can no longer continue with the false claim that these standards were ‘state-led’ and are the will of American voters, teachers, principals, and parents.”
“The NGA also can no longer deny the federal government's role in this initiative, since we now know that cash-strapped states were financially coerced to adopt these standards in order to receive Race to the Top federal stimulus funds, NCLB waivers and Title I funds,” Arthurs continued. “These standards may not have been a federal mandate, but that is only because the federal government could not do this by law. They skirted the law as best they could and their intent is undeniable."
Arthurs also challenged what has been the claim of the NGA and other proponents that the Common Core is just “standards,” and not “curriculum.”
“We have seen the publisher's criteria sent out by the NGA and CCSSO to textbook companies to instruct them how to make their material comply with these national standards,” Arthurs said. “Also, it is the federal government that exclusively funds the national PARCC and SBAC assessment tests which will be used to make sure that states are teaching to these standards.”
Arthurs said that, contrary to the depiction of Common Core opponents as “crazy,” American parents – and voters – have become very informed and educated about the standards initiative.
“We are not going away,” she asserted. “Several of the members of the NGA initially supported these standards due to the impressive Gates-funded sales pitch, but they too have educated themselves. They are now paying attention to the facts and the will of their constituents.”
In a recent Washington Post interview, Bill Gates admitted that the primary goal of the Common Core was to socially engineer the “huge problem that low-income kids get less good education than suburban kids get…”
The argument has been made, however, that in attempting to make it easier for low-income and minority children to be part of an engineered “workforce,” the low-quality Common Core standards actually do a disservice to bright children wanting to move on to STEM careers, regardless of their background.
Dr. Sandra Stotsky, Professor Emerita, University of Arkansas, and Dr. R. James Milgram, Professor Emeritus, Stanford University, are both standards experts who were invited to be members of the Common Core Validation Committee, but refused to sign off on the standards.
In an email statement to Breitbart News, Stotsky said:

It is a sad commentary on the education of both Republican and Democratic governors that neither group of governors has seen fit to ask their higher education teaching faculty in science, engineering, and mathematics to tell them how Common Core's mathematics standards and tests deepen the lack of equity in K-12 education.

“Some of us really don't care about things like whether or not Common Core is a federal takeover of public education,” Milgram, a mathematician, told Breitbart News.
“If the standards were capable of improving the outcomes for our brighter students who would, normally, be interested in STEM areas, I'd be their strongest supporter,” he added. “But they don't do this at all. They are aimed at the weakest students and provide an absolute minimum for students to enter a community college, nothing more.”
“Statistically speaking, even if a student with this background wanted to major in a STEM related area, only one in fifty would succeed,” Milgram said.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Governm...ve-Common-Core

Oklahoma Supreme Court Rules State Legislature Has Authority to Repeal Common Core Standards



by Dr. Susan Berry 15 Jul 2014 176 post a comment
Oklahoma Supreme Court upholds Common Core repeal

Oklahoma Supreme Court upholds Common Core repeal






In a case that has drawn attention to the level of power attained by largely unelected state boards of education over the elected representatives of the people in a state legislature, the Oklahoma Supreme Court upheld Tuesday the state’s repeal of the Common Core standards, ruling that the Oklahoma legislature had the authority to repeal the controversial standards in the state’s public schools.

According to FoxNews.com, in the case of the lawsuit organized against the state by the National Association of State Boards of Education (NASBE), Oklahoma’s highest court decided 8-1 that the legislature’s action to repeal the standards was not unconstitutional.

In early June, Gov. Mary Fallin (R) signed into law a bill, passed with overwhelming bipartisan support, that repealed the Common Core standards in her state and replaced them with standards to be developed by the state of Oklahoma. The new standards must be proven to be sufficiently unlike the Common Core standards. Until the new standards are developed, Oklahoma is reverting to its former PASS standards.
Former Oklahoma state attorney general Robert McCampbell, however, represented some parents, teachers, and four of seven members of the Oklahoma Board of Education, who argued against the “excessive involvement” of the state legislature with standards for Oklahoma’s public schools.
McCampbell said Oklahoma’s Common Core repeal bill was unconstitutional because involvement by the state legislature with new standards would encroach upon the state board of education’s constitutional authority and would violate the separation of powers.
During oral arguments, McCampbell argued the legislature’s repeal of Common Core represented an “unprecedented expansion” of its powers.
“Supervision of instruction is vested in the Board of Education,” he said.
Oklahoma state Rep. Jason Nelson (R), however, asserted the bill that repealed the Common Core standards in Oklahoma is constitutional.
"The Supreme Court made the right decision today. I thought the justices asked great questions, hitting all the salient points during the hearing this morning, and I felt good about our case after the hearing,” Nelson told Breitbart News. “The arguments in favor of the constitutionality of the law are strong and left little doubt that the decision would be favorable. I've believed from the beginning that this legal challenge was baseless and have said so since it was filed.”
“I'm grateful to Attorney General Scott Pruitt and his staff, specifically Solicitor General Patrick Wyrick and Assistant Solicitor General Cara Rodriguez, for their outstanding legal defense of this legislative action,” Nelson said. “I'm also grateful to those individuals and organizations who voluntarily offered their perspectives to the Court by filing legal briefs in defense of the law.”

“The Court’s opinion today removes any uncertainty,” he added. “Based on the many educators I know personally I have no doubt that Oklahoma’s teachers are more than capable of making the necessary adjustments and will be more than ready when children, mine included, begin showing up after the summer break.”
Emmett McGroarty, education director at the American Principles Project, spoke to Breitbart News about the significance of the Oklahoma high court’s ruling.
“Today, the Oklahoma Supreme Court has upheld the power of the legislature to set education policy. In so doing, it has quashed the problematic, Progressive idea that the state board of education is vested with both legislative and executive powers,” McGroarty said. “The ruling today also re-affirms the doctrine of the separation of powers and the system of checks and balances on which our constitutional structure rests.”
Jenni White, parent and president of Restore Oklahoma Public Education (R.O.P.E.), told Breitbart News that the state’s Supreme Court ruling is really a win for local education.
“The ruling is a stunning victory for local education and a defeat for bureaucracy,” White said. “Hopefully, states will ultimately work toward having elected state boards of education who can be voted out if they make decisions that are against the best interests of our students.”
“What’s also important about this ruling is that parents can see that they can influence this process,” White added.
NASBE is an out-of-state organization that supports the national implementation of the Common Core State Standards. The organization has received nearly $2 million in grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the primary source of private funding for the Common Core standards. It received $1,077,960 in February of 2011 “to build the capacity of State Boards of Education to better position them to achieve full implementation of the Common Core standards.” NASBE also received $800,000 in June of 2013 “to support a development plan for the organization and its efforts to provide training and information to implement Common Core state Standards.”

video at link below

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Governm...Core-Standards

KEENE: Editing out an enlightened history of America

Liberal scholars indoctrinate students with a view of a nation built on dark motives


State Senator: USC Upstate about "indoctrination", not education






By David Keene
-
The Washington Times

Monday, July 14, 2014

• Enlarge Photo
  Illustration on Common Core’s version of American History by Alexander Hunter/The Washington

• Audio Clip: 07-15-14 11d David Keene with Andy Parks

By David Keene
-
The Washington Times
Monday, July 14, 2014


In the early days of the American Republic, Thomas Jefferson was perhaps the staunchest advocate of public education. Jefferson authored a plan for public primary and secondary schools and is father of the University of Virginia. He would be appalled at the state of public education today.

Jefferson loved reading and knowledge for its own sake, of course, but believed the success of the American experiment depended on an educational system that would instill a knowledge of history and values in the citizenry. He was not alone among the Founders in this belief, but few expressed themselves better. Jefferson was eloquent on the study of history as especially important because, as he put it, “apprising [students] of the past will enable them to judge of the future.”

Enemies of free government have always recognized this simple truth and have tried to recast history to lead the next generations to believe as they do. Kings and emperors, Soviets and Nazis of the past, and extremist Muslims today employ court historians, forever mingling history and politics. They know they can shape the policies of today and tomorrow by creating a past of their own.

Howard Zinn, perhaps this country’s most successful radical or progressive historian, put it best when he said he wrote history “to change the world.” He understood history as indoctrination and felt it vital that the next generation be indoctrinated, or educated by learning his version of history. Like Jefferson, Zinn knew that the values passed on to future generations through the educational system shape the future by dictating political choices. There the similarities end — Jefferson and his contemporaries were products of the Enlightenment, assuming education to be a search for truth rather than a means of dictating the future. Zinn intended — and today’s liberal progressives seek — to replace the traditional view of American history with a dark view of a nation built on aggressive racist imperialism, theft and genocide. They would drive those who do not agree from the public square, or at least from the classroom.

David Horowitz and others have sounded the alarm about our college campuses for decades, but the bubbling controversy is now focused on the College Board. Headed by David Coleman, who most consider the architect of Common Core, the College Board is a private, nonprofit that for more than a century has set standards for college admissions. It essentially dictates what high schools need to teach their best students in disciplines from math to history to English in preparing them for college. Teachers who used to teach from a five-page framework, now receive a 98-page, detailed set of instructions on what history should be taught.

Zinn might have written the framework. Gone are most of the Founders and their ideas, as is their vision of a country dedicated to freedom. Major historical figures such as James Madison and Benjamin Franklin are ignored. As Jane Robbins and Larry Krieger of the American Principles Project put it, the framework distorts history and advances a consistently negative view of America.

They claim with justification that the College Board in advancing an ideological framework is operating as a “de facto legislature for the nation’s public and private high schools” with the power to essentially dictate what will be taught to students studying American history. Ms. Robbins and Mr. Krieger call it a “coup.” The National Association of Scholars essentially agrees with them, calling the framework a “dispiriting document.”

The Association study points out that while defenders of the new framework argue that high schools can go beyond the framework and teach students about Madison and others or expose them to different perspectives on the nation’s history, few will. They will “teach to the test” to make sure their students do well on college admissions tests without realizing that in the process, they will be indoctrinating generations of college-bound students.
Local control of primary and secondary education has been steadily wrested from the hands of parents and local authorities in the name of standards and quality by a federal government susceptible to pressure from ideological special interests. Those same interests dominate supposedly private groups more focused on indoctrination than educational excellence.

The Founders’ grand experiment is being put at risk by liberal progressive educational ideologues intent upon creating a citizenry ignorant of its real history, but indoctrinated to hate its country, its history and those who founded it.

David A. Keene is opinion editor of The Washington Times.


video at link below

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/...ory-of-americ/

The Founders’ grand experiment is being put at risk by liberal progressive educational ideologues intent upon creating a citizenry ignorant of its real history, but indoctrinated to hate its country, its history and those who founded it.

What part of the "indoctrination" of our children is considered to be education?? Indoctrinating our children is the same as brain washing them..Last I looked education is "reading, writing, language, history, science and math, at least that is what I was taught in school....Wake Up america!!! Today we have morons teachings morons. and Socialist teaching your children in college. The only thing they are learning today is sex with videos and how to bat, throw, and toss a ball. Teach your children well folks, home school, or least reinforce their education or they will grow up to be uneducated imbeciles. My opinion of course.