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

Bear Witness Central brings you daily featured articles and videos of current importance and interest to all through our two websites in English and Spanish. The articles posted here are just a small selection of articles available at our websites, please visit us frequently for latest posts and videos. Reach out to others, forward this e-mail to your lists. BEAR WITNESS CENTRAL Visit our website for daily updates! SPECIAL REPORT TOP TEN THINGS PARENTS HATE ABOUT COMMON CORE This is the year new national Common Core tests kick in, replacing state tests in most locales, courtesy of an eager Obama administration and the future generation’s tax dollars. It’s also the first year a majority of people interviewed tell pollsters they’ve actually heard of Common Core, four years after bureaucrats signed our kids onto this complete overhaul of U.S. education. Common Core has impressed everyone from Bill Gates to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan. So why do 62 percent of parents think it’s a bad idea. For one, they can count. But their kids can’t.… [Read More...] THE FAILURES OF COMMON CORE For the sake of a uniformity in education promoted as a good so that when students move to different schools they will be on the same page in their various courses (the strongest favorable argument), and so that extensive testing can measure student progress comparatively through the common core (more “educating to the test”), a curriculum/educational standards/testing regime has been adopted by … [Read More...] WARNING FROM THE CATHOLIC LEAGUE AND CARDINAL NEWMAN SOCIETY ON COMMON CORE The implementation of Common Core in New York State, one of the first states to adopt it, is an abject failure: academic achievement is regressing. Whatever merits it may have, its most vociferous proponents are out of line when they try to strong-arm Catholic schools into accepting it. The Council for a Strong America (CSA) is pressuring Catholic educators to adopt Common Core. That wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t doing so at the behest of its benefactor, the Gates Foundation, or if it weren’t bashing the Cardinal Newman Society (CNS), a respectable Catholic education non-profit, for opposing Common Core. But the fact is that CSA has received $1.7 million from the Gates Foundation, and its Florida office is hammering CNS for making “strident attacks” on the program. God forbid that Catholic schools exercise their independence by rejecting Common Core. A little more than half of Catholic dioceses have accepted Common Core, and some are having misgivings about doing so.… [Read More...] A LETTER TO GOVERNOR SCOTT ON COMMON CORE! One insidious element of Common Core is "assessment". High stakes standardized testing has been a problem (read: it is not beneficial to the children) since before Common Core. The fact is, the teacher is still the best source of assessment of student achievement. There are alternatives to standardized tests. Therefore, school boards and parents need a way to opt out of standardized tests. I’m sure you are aware of growing resistance to high stakes standardized testing as demonstrated by actions taken by the Lee County School Board, among others, to investigate opting out. The 11 member Greater Florida Consortium of School Boards and the Florida Education Association are urging the state to provide an opt out provision for such testing.… [Read More...] FLORIDA'S DECEPTIVE COMMON CORE IMPLEMENTATION AND TEACHER TRAINING Despite Gov. Rick Scott’s executive order (Executive Order 13-276) replacing the Common Core and withdrawing Florida from PARCC, teachers are still being trained in Common Core as the Florida Standards are essentially the Common Core State Standards with another name, slight renumbering of standards, and a few additional standards.… [Read More...] BREAKING: THIS HUGE LAWSUIT LAUNCHED THAT COULD TAKE DOWN COMMON CORE FOR GOOD Gretchen Logue and Anne Gassel, anti-Common Core activists from the Missouri Coalition Against Common Core have joined together with Fred N.Saur, a former Republican candidate to file a lawsuit against Gov. Jay Nixon to stop taxpayer dollars from being used to fund the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium. The SBAC is one of two organizations responsible for creating tests that are aligned with the standards set forth in Common Core. This lawsuit could take it down, and “Common Core” with it, for good.… [Read More...] GREEN BAY CATHOLIC DIOCESE BACKS AWAY FROM COMMON CORE The Catholic Diocese of Green Bay, Wisconsin says it has decided to back away from the Common Core standards but is struggling with the cost of replacing Common Core-aligned textbooks. According to the Green Bay Press Gazette, Catholic school administrator Dr. Joseph Bound acknowledged that the growing political backlash against Common Core helped the diocese to back away from the controversial … [Read More...] TAKE ACTION: STOP COMMON CORE IN CATHOLIC SCHOOLS – SEND A LETTER TO THE BISHOPS We must do all we can to stop Common Core in the Catholic schools. Common Core is bad for our children and we must stop it. We need to send letters to all the Bishops to remove Common Core from our Catholic schools. Let us start with Florida.… [Read More...] ALONE NO MORE! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ VISIT OUR WEBSITE FOR DAILY UPDATES ON IMPORTANT BREAKING ARTICLES AND EVENTS WWW.BWCentral.org Bear Witness Central is reaching out to all Americans with our bilingual newsletters and English and Spanish websites in preparation for the crucial 2014 and 2016 elections. It is very important that we reach out to those that do not get the information that the media sensors. WATCH THE BWC 19 TV CHANNELS WITH INFORMATION THAT YOU NEED TO KNOW LIBERTAD USA BEAR WITNESS CENTRAL EN ESPAÑOL A Project of Bear Witness Central COMMON CORE Y LA EDUCACION DE SUS HIJOS… Sería interesante hacer una encuesta para averiguar cuántos padres tienen conocimiento de unos nuevos estándares educativos, conocidos en ingles por el nombre de Common Core State Standards (CCSS). Estos nuevos estándares reemplazaran a los de años previos. Los padres, como contribuyentes, ya que ellos pagan impuestos, pagan por la educación de sus hijos. Por lo tanto, uno pensaría que ellos tuviesen una voz en el aprendizaje de sus hijos. Es más, uno pensaría que las opiniones de los … [Lea mas...] DETENGAN EL COMMON CORE EN LAS ESCUELAS CATOLICAS – ENVIEN LA PETICION A LOS OBISPOS… Es necesario oponerse a las nuevas regulaciones de educación llamadas COMMON CORE STANDARDS que han sido implementadas en muchos estados, tanto como en la mayoría de las escuelas Católicas … [Lea mas...] LOS TEMAS DE ACTUALIDAD AHORA EN LIBERTAD USA RADIO Y TV! OIGA LAS ENTREVISTAS DE LOS DIRECTORES DE BEAR WITNESS CENTRAL Y OTROS LIDERES CONSERVADORES EN LIBERTAD USA RADIO LEA DIARIAMENTE OTROS ARTICULOS Y EVENTOS IMPORTANTES EN NUESTRO SITIO WEB www.LibertadUSA.com Please forward this newsletter to friends and family Remove your e-mail address at the bottom before sending to others. ---------------------------------- Por favor quita tu direccion de e-mail de abajo antes que lo envies a otros. Sign up to receive your own newsletter by going here. Member of Tea Party Patriots and American Hispanic Coalition. Credits, Disclaimer and Fair Use Notices are listed in our website. Bear Witness Central Reaching out to America From Miami, Daytona, Jacksonville, Orlando, Tallahassee, FL BEAR WITNESS CENTRAL www.BWCentral.org www.LibertadUSA.com www.AmericanHispanicCoalition.org LET US TAKE OUR COUNTRY BACK!

Not affiliated with any candidate, party or committee.

Common Core Lesson Teaches that America is a Racist Nation
tpnn.com
The United States Constitution gives no authority to the federal government over education. In fact, since education is not listed as an enumerated power within the authority of the federal government, by law, the authority of education is left in the hands of state and local governments. But, that has not stopped the federal government…

John Stossel - Common Core



LibertyPen



Published on Oct 6, 2014
Robert Pondiscio (Fordham Institute Senior Fellow) and Joy Pullmann (Heartland Institute Research Fellow) join John to debate the value of Common Core. Then, Stossel recounts the past 40 years of government education schemes. http://www.LibertyPen.com

A Common Sense Approach to Common Core Math

Filed in Common Core State Standards by Shane Vander Hart on October 1, 2014

Barry Garelick is providing a great service to parents and teachers who have no choice but to navigate through the Common Core Math waters. Garelick has a degree in Mathematics from the University of Michigan and after retiring from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency he sought out credentials to teach secondary math in California.He started in August a series of articles entitled “A Common-Sense Approach to Common Core Math” found at The Heartland Institute’s School Reform News. Right now there are three articles, but I’m sure there will be more on the way.Here is an excerpt from his introductory article:

I believe that CC math, while not dictating particular teaching styles, has thrown gasoline on the ideological fire that has been raging for slightly more than two decades in education. I am referring to what is known as “reform math.” Reform math has manifested itself in classrooms across the United States mostly in lower grades, in the form of “discovery-oriented” and “student-centered” classes, in which the teacher becomes a facilitator or “guide on the side” rather than the “sage on the stage” and students work so-called “real world” or “authentic problems.” It also has taken the form of de-emphasizing practices and drills, requiring oral or written “explanations” from students on how they solved a problem (besides showing their work), finding more than one way to do a problem, and using cumbersome strategies for basic arithmetic functions. Math reformers say such practices will result in students understanding how numbers work—i.e., math is about “understanding,” not simply “doing”.
CC lends itself to such interpretations because of the words “explain” and “understand” in their content standards as well as eight overarching standards called “Standards for Mathematical Practice” that embody “habits of mind” of mathematical thinking. On the surface and to those unaware of underlying concerns and issues, the SMPs appear reasonable. But they are being interpreted to force students into developing “habits of mind” outside of the context of the material being learned—which again feeds into the reform math ideology.

In part I he addresses some selected First and Second Grade standards. In part 2 he tackles Third Grade fractions. In part 3 just published Monday he discusses drawing diagrams for dividing fractions.
I encourage you to keep tabs on future articles as well.

http://truthinamericaneducation.com/...n+Education%29

Reading Requires Outside Knowledge


Filed in Common Core State Standards by Shane Vander Hart on September 30, 2014 • 0 Comments

Daniel Willingham is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and he wrote a piece at Real Clear Education entitled “Common Core and ‘Close Reading’: Effectiveness Questionable without Outside Knowledge” that is worth a read.
He points out that close reading entails rereading the text kids are working with and then dealing mainly with the author’s words in the text. Both of these he says are good practices (and I agree).
It is the third component of close reading that he has an issue with. Willingham writes:

…we will view a text as being self-contained. We will only draw conclusions that are defensible via the author’s words. In fact, we will read the text as though we know nothing about the subject at hand; the author’s words will be not only necessary for our interpretation, we’ll consider them sufficient.
It’s that last bit that seems crazy to me.
Rereading? Sure. Paying close attention to the author’s words? Great idea. But pretending that one’s knowledge is not relevant to interpreting a text conflicts with how writers write and with how readers read.
Writers count on their audience to bring knowledge to bear on the text.
….
So the nature of writing and the nature of reading seem contrary to one aspect of close reading, namely, the idea that we can put a fence around a text, and read it only with reference to the contents of the text.
….
Except in very restricted academic settings — that is, among people who like close reading — it’s not obvious to me how this sort of reading will serve students well.
Careful study of language, focus on the author’s words, assumption that rereading pays off: yes. Excluding knowledge outside of the text: no.

Read the rest.
HT: Education in Iowa – Karen W looks at video of a close reading exercise with 4th graders. It’s worth taking a look.

http://truthinamericaneducation.com/...n+Education%29

Nebraska Schools Ban Term ‘Boys And Girls’, Train Teachers To Avoid ‘Gendered Expressions’

Weird internal documents promote "metrosexuality" and 'gender spectrum'; refer to 'genderbread person' instead of 'gingerbread man'








by Steve Watson | Infowars.com | October 8, 2014

02260

---

In what is possibly one of the most unsettling examples of political correctness, schools in Lincoln, Nebraska, are training teachers to completely disavow gender, and avoid referring to pupils as ‘boys and girls’.
Liberty minded Independent news website Nebraska Watchdog uncovered the documents. In one handout, entitled “12 easy steps on the way to gender inclusiveness,” teachers are advised to “Avoid asking kids to line up as boys or girls or separating them by gender.”
“Instead, use things like ‘odd and even birth date,’ or ‘Which would you choose: skateboards or bikes/milk or juice/dogs or cats/summer or winter/talking or listening.’ … Always ask yourself, ’Will this configuration create a gendered space?’” the material states.
“Don’t use phrases such as ‘boys & girls,’ ‘you guys,’ ‘ladies and gentlemen,’ and similarly gendered expressions to get kids’ attention,” it continues, before providing further utterly ludicrous suggestions such as ‘campers,’ ‘readers,’ athletes’ or even ‘purple penguins’.
The material then gets downright weird, stating “Provide an opportunity for every student to identify a preferred name or pronoun. … When you find it necessary to reference gender, say ‘Boy, girl, both or neither.’”
In wording that wouldn’t look out of place in Aldous Huxley’s fictional dystopia Brave New World, the material even tells teachers how to respond if and when children question why they should avoid terms that identify gender.
“When asked why, use this as a teachable moment. Emphasize to students that your classroom recognizes and celebrates the gender diversity of all students.” the material urges.
The documents use material from a website called itspronouncedmetrosexual.com, a self described “comedy show and online resource about snap judgments, identity, and oppression.”
While on the surface it appears to promote gender equality, it doesn’t take much digging to discover that in reality the site promotes ‘gender neutrality’ – a bizarre politically correct concept that asserts there are no differences at all between male and female human beings.
In an info-graphic, produced by the website and used by Lincoln schools, a traditional ‘Gingerbread man’ is replaced with a ‘Genderbread person’.
The description of the image (click to enlarge) reads “Gender is one of those things everyone thinks they understand, but most people don’t.”

“It’s not either/or,” the handout continues, “In many cases it’s both/and. A bit of this, a dash of that.” The document, which is designed to be handed out to kids, encourages the reader to define their gender based on how much they align with “what you understand to be the options for gender” such as “two-spirit” and “gender/queer.”
Elsewhere in the documents used by teachers in Lincoln is a handout that defines “gender identity” as “a psychological quality; unlike biological sex, it can’t be observed or measured, only reported by the individual. Like biological sex, it consists of more than two categories, including those who identify as a third gender, two-spirit (both), or agender (neither).”
The material also encourages teachers to shape the minds of children by sharing “personal anecdotes from your own life that reflect gender inclusiveness. Even better, share examples when you were not gender inclusive in your thinking, words or behaviors, what you learned as a result, and what you will do differently next time.”
Lincoln Public Schools Superintendent Steve Joel defended the materials, telling local radio host Kevin Thomas that “our position, ours is inclusiveness. … We know that there’s a correlation between bullying and gender, as well as sexual preference, and so you know, as a school district, we’re just trying to provide information for our folks to understand that a little bit better.”
“I’m happy, I’m pleased,” Joel added, “because we have to create an awareness amongst ourselves, that we have kids coming to us from so many different backgrounds, and some of those are confusing to the students themselves, to other students, and to some of our staff.”
While the materials have only been distributed to limited schools so far, the intention is to spread them further, possibly exposing close to 40,000 children to the notion that gender is defunct.
When asked what the school would do if some teachers and parents disagreed with the material on political or religious grounds, Joel stated “If we have teachers that are offended or bothered by what it is we’re trying to do as a school system, in serving all students and all populations and all demographics, then they need to meet with their principal and talk through that, but the expectation is that we’re going to do it.”
Al Riskowski, executive director of the Nebraska Family Alliance, hit back at school officials’ position, saying that the materials go “way beyond trying to teach someone how to respect another individual,” and accusing officials of attempting to re-educate people to a “whole new idea of boy-girl.”
Riskowski describes the material as a revision of the “gender spectrum philosophy,” adding that the notion “your biology at birth doesn’t designate who you are,” but instead you’re on a “gender spectrum” is at odds with the beliefs of “almost everyone in the community.”
Hat tip: Daily Caller
—————————————————————-
Steve Watson is a London based writer and editor for Alex Jones’ Infowars.com, and Prisonplanet.com. He has a Masters Degree in International Relations from the School of Politics at The University of Nottingham, and a Bachelor Of Arts Degree in Literature and Creative Writing from Nottingham Trent University.

Awake yet America...i

Urbandale Schools to Offer Parent University on Iowa Core

October 8, 2014 By Shane Vander Hart

I just wrote today about a school district offering a class to teach parents how to do Common Core math. Urbandale Community Education, we have learned, wants to teach parents about the Iowa Core on Monday, October 20th at 7:00p at the Urbandale High School Performing Arts Center.

From an email they sent a few days ago:

Urbandale Community Education invites you to join us for a FREE informational session regarding the District’s implementation of the Iowa Core.
The Iowa Core represents our statewide academic standards, which describe what students should know and be able to do in math, science, English language arts and social studies.
The Iowa Core also addresses 21st century skills in areas such as financial and technology literacy. These state standards provide Iowa students, parents, teachers, and other stakeholders with a clear, common understanding of what students are expected to learn at every grade level, regardless of where they live.
Learn more about how the Iowa Core is being implemented in Urbandale at a FREE information session for parents.

We expect that they will address “misconceptions” about the Iowa Core so I’m pretty confident it will be nothing more than a propaganda session. Has your school district offered such a class for parents?

Filed Under: Iowa Ed News

About Shane Vander Hart
Shane Vander Hart founded Iowans for Local Control in 2012 which later merged with Iowa RestorEd. Shane also is the founder and editor-in-chief of Caffeinated Thoughts and the founder and president of 4:15 Communications, LLC, a social media & communications consulting/management firm. You can connect with Shane on Facebook or follow him on Twitter and Google +.




http://iowarestored.com/2014/10/urba...ity-iowa-core/

Liberal Students and Teachers Protest Patriotic History Curriculum

Written on Wednesday, October 8, 2014 by David L. Goetsch






A controversy has erupted in suburban Denver public schools. A conservative school board member has proposed to revise the history curriculum so that it includes coverage of good citizenship, patriotism, and respect for authority. As things stand now, the history curriculum in suburban Denver schools consists of the typical leftwing, anti-American tripe. In this curriculum the Founding fathers are portrayed as a bunch of slaveholding patriarchs who suppressed women and exploited the poor, and America is portrayed as a war-mongering, colonialist bully that mistreated poor, peace-loving Indian tribes and stole Texas and California from the hapless Mexicans. As taught by liberal revisionists, Davy Crockett and the other intrepid patriots slaughtered at the Alamo were imperialist scoundrels who got what they deserved.
As disturbing as leftwing revisionist history sounds, there is nothing new in this situation. Liberals now control public education nationwide and have long since converted the system into a propaganda machine for the left. What is different, at least in Denver, is that voters somehow broke with tradition and elected a conservative to the school board; one who knows the truth about America’s history, and insists it be reflected in the curriculum of public schools. This particular school board member—a conservative David fighting the liberal Goliath—decided she wasn’t going to just fold her hands and do nothing while school children are being transformed into the intellectual equivalent of sheep; young people who are unable to think for themselves and are, therefore, easy to manipulate. Unwilling to accept the historical revisionism of the left, this school board member proposed a new history curriculum that accurately reflects what is best about America and helps students become good, patriotic citizens who respect authority and know how to think for themselves.
You would have thought she was proposing the legalization of child molestation. In response to her proposal, teachers staged sick outs and students used social media to organize walk outs; protests reminiscent of the anti-war demonstrations of the 1960s. With the presumed superiority common to liberals, students and teachers self-righteously claimed they were acting in the highest traditions of Constitutional dissent and free speech. In other words, they wrapped themselves in the flag while defending an anti-American curriculum that seeks to undermine everything the flag stands for. I was pleased to see that the students and teachers understand their Constitutional right to dissent, but I doubt their motives. A more accurate explanation of the teacher sick-outs and student protests would be that liberal teachers do not want to give up their time-worn lesson plans on the evils of America, and students do not want to give up a curriculum that validates their victimhood mentality.
Actually, I was encouraged that liberal teachers and their thoroughly indoctrinated, ovine students actually recognized that America has a Constitution, and that the Constitution contains a Bill of Rights. I wonder who told them. Someone must have since their insistence on a one-sided history curriculum suggests they have never read the Constitution. Even those liberals who have read the Constitution don’t seem to get it. In listening to their muddle-headed protests against good citizenship, patriotism, and respect for authority, it struck me that Denver’s teachers and students are missing a few important points. Here are just a few of those points:

• Liberals refuse to teach good citizenship, yet it is good citizens who work to improve their communities, and who participate in self-government by turning out to vote; a rarity in contemporary America. Good citizens build better neighborhoods, better communities, and a better America. Look around you. What do you see? You see once safe neighborhoods that have been transformed into mini-war zones ruled by gangs and corrupted by drug dealing and crime. In addition to the degradation of our communities, America now has the lowest voter participation rate of any democracy in the world. Voter apathy in America is a disgrace. It is an affront to the Founding Fathers who sacrificed so much to establish government by the people, and it is a betrayal of the Civil Rights movement that ensured government by the people meant government by all the people. A history curriculum that does not emphasize the importance of good citizenship is not just unworthy of public funding, it is dangerous. If we continue to graduate students who are not just poor citizens, but who hate America, we—meaning Americans of all stripes and political persuasions—will suffer the consequences. We are going to wake up one day and realize that the violent, crime-and-drug infested, gangbanging communities we see on the news every night have become the rule in America, not the exception.
• Concerning the teaching of patriotism, I wonder if the liberals who insist on teaching a we-hate-America curriculum have ever considered the ultimate consequences of turning successive generations of American students against their own country. America exists in a dangerous world. We have enemies in all corners of that world, enemies who are willing to die to bring America to its knees and rob Americans of their freedom and liberty. Even now we have American citizens joining ISIS and Al Qaeda to fight against America. If our public schools continue to teach students to hate America, more and more American citizens will turn against our country and fewer and fewer will fight for it. I wonder what revisionist historians think is going to happen to them when their false teaching results in the refusal of young Americans to fight and die for the freedoms liberals so smugly abuse. Young people who have been taught to hate America are not likely to join the military to defend her.
• On the matter of teaching students to respect authority, one would think that even liberal teachers would support this goal. After all, more than 1,200 public school teachers are physically assaulted by students every month in America. This is just one example of what the left’s disdain for authority has wrought. Teaching respect for authority does not mean that we teach blind obedience or stop teaching civil disobedience. America has a long and storied history of using civil disobedience to advance the cause of freedom and liberty. America’s independence from Great Britain, the Civil Rights Movement, and many other aspects of our nation’s history involved the appropriate use of civil disobedience. But when disobedience is all that is taught, students get a distorted view of what good citizenship involves, and respect for authority goes out the window. This is precisely what is happening in America now. The lack of respect for authority can be seen in assaults on teachers, police officers, other authority figures, and even parents. When respect for authority is lost, civilization breaks down. This is precisely what is happening in America right now.

America’s history is replete with many things of which every American can and should be proud. We also have aspects of our history that are not worthy of the vision established by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence and by the authors of the Preamble to our Constitution. I do not propose that these unworthy aspects of our history be ignored, but I do propose that they be presented in the proper context and presented accurately as exceptions not the rule. To do otherwise is not just intellectually dishonest, it is a threat to the long-term viability of our nation.


Read the rest of this Patriot Update article here: http://patriotupdate.com/articles/li...k9YCy6ivY7Y.99

Revolt against Common Core in full swing

May 10, 2014 by Leo Hohmann

The more parents and teachers learn about the one-size-fits-all education standards called Common Core and the data it gathers on children to serve the needs of corporations and the state, the more their anger builds.
That anger has turned to action with a movement calling for this one defiant act.
So far, it’s working.

The Obama administration, shortly after taking control of the federal bureaucracy, changed student privacy laws so that government can track their progress from “cradle to career,” monitoring everything from math and reading skills to values, opinions and attitudes.
More and more people don’t like that. And they are just saying “no” to the government.
It is the amount of student data being collected that ballooned under the new Common Core national education standards, fueled fears of abuse and sparked a growing backlash against the testing system used to scoop up highly personal information.
The “opt out” movement in which parents opt their children out of the standardized tests has spread in recent weeks from New York to Georgia to Alabama.
Some teachers have also started to buck the system. Just last week teachers at Prospect Heights International School in Brooklyn, NY, refused to administer a standardized test tied to Common Core.
The cost of resisting, however, can be steep.
Meg Norris was forced out of her job as a Hall County, Ga., teacher last year after she ran afoul of mandatory testing for Common Core.
“We were one of the first counties in the nation to implement Common Core, and at first the teachers felt like we were special, we were all excited. I drank the Kool-Aid,” said Norris. “But after teaching Common Core in my class for about 18 months, I started seeing a lot of behaviors in my students that I hadn’t seen before. They started becoming extremely frustrated and at that age, 12 years old, they can’t verbalize why they couldn’t ‘get it.’”
The frustration, she believes, came from Georgia’s adoption of a set of unproven educational standards and then constantly testing students against those standards. Some schools administer up to a dozen or more high-stakes tests in a single school year.
“I had some kids that were cutting themselves, some were crying, some would stab themselves in the legs with their pencils,” Norris said.
One of the complaints about Common Core standards voiced by Norris and other teachers is that they require pre-teens to learn abstract concepts their brains aren’t yet able to grasp.
One day a student came up to Norris and asked, “Do we have to take the test?”
“No, you don’t have to do anything your parents don’t want you to do,” Norris responded.
That was when the school district opened a secretive internal investigation on its wayward teacher and she resigned.
Will Estrada, director of federal relations for the Home School Legal Defense Association, said the assessments tied to Common Core collect more than 400 points of data on every child.
“It’s their likes and dislikes, grade-point average all the way through school, their home situation, health questions,” he said. “It’s an incredibly invasive collection of information that they are trying to collect in what they call P-20, or pre-K through workforce.”
The idea behind opting out is to “starve the beast,” a reference to the corporations and nonprofits that feed on the $8 billion student assessment industry. They analyze the test data, come up with recommendations on how to “remediate” the students’ weaknesses, then sell that information back to the school districts at a profit.
This type of student data mining by private contractors was made possible only after the Obama administration moved unilaterally to dilute privacy restrictions in the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act. The new rules took effect in January 2012 without congressional approval.
Even before FERPA rules were weakened, some in Congress had concerns about the U.S. Department of Education’s “cradle to career education agenda,” as DOE Secretary Arne Duncan described the president’s plan.
Rep. John Kline, R-Minn., chairman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, sent a February 2010 letter to Duncan saying the department’s efforts to “shepherd the states toward the creation of a de facto national student database raises serious legal and prudential questions. Congress has never authorized the Department of Education to facilitate the creation of a national student database. To the contrary, Congress explicitly prohibited the ‘development of a nationwide database of personally identifiable information’ under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and barred the ‘development, implementation or maintenance of a federal database of personally identifiable information …including a unit record system, an education bar-code system or any other system that tracks individual students over time.’”
Fordham University Law School’s Center on Law and Information Privacy published a study in late 2009 warning that private student data was at risk and that many school systems across the U.S. were not following the rules under FERPA, basically ignoring key protections of the nation’s school children.
Fordham found that sensitive, personalized information related to matters such as teen pregnancies, mental health, family wealth indicators and juvenile crime is stored in a manner that violates federal privacy mandates.
Some states outsource the data processing without any restrictions on use or confidentiality for K-12 children’s information, the Fordham study found. Access to this information and the disclosure of personal data may occur for decades and follow children well into their adult lives.
Catastrophic results
“If these issues are not addressed, the results could be catastrophic from a privacy perspective,” warned Joel Reidenberg, a professor at Fordham Law School. He urged Congress and state officials to take “rapid steps to ensure the data is collected and stored properly and used in compliance with established privacy laws and principles.”
Two years later, instead of heeding those warnings, the U.S. Department of Education went in the opposite direction and watered down the FERPA protections with respect to releasing data to third-party private contractors.
The Obama administration also required all states receiving federal Race to the Top funds to put in place longitudinal databases capable of tracking students’ progress over time. These databases are designed to be “interoperable,” essentially creating a uniform data chain across the 50 states.
Defeating a monster of this size and scope would seem daunting.
But one education activist with some experience in this area says it’s a battle worth fighting.
Anita Hoge filed a federal complaint against the state of Pennsylvania under the Protection of Pupils Rights Amendment in the early 1990s over that state’s invasive Educational Quality Assessment. She believes that project was a model for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, NAEP, that illegally measured attitudes, values, opinions, and dispositions on tests without informed parental consent. Her successful lawsuit dealt a blow to the plans for a universal data tracking system that follows every student from pre-K through college and into their careers.
Twenty years later, Hoge sees Common Core as the centerpiece of a renewed effort to implement a testing system that again seeks to identify values and dispositions in students.
“Opting out is really the key,” said Hoge, now an education consultant and expert on student assessments. “Everything depends on the data. You start with data collection at the local level and that is your weakest link. That drives the whole thing. From there you score it, you analyze it, you can cross-reference it with census data and you can identify the individual student and the individual teacher, the curriculum, the interventions. You can now make a decision as to why scores are not up to par. Is it the teacher not teaching to the test? That’s why teachers are so upset.”
Hoge believes Common Core is to education what Obamare is to healthcare.
“It’s exactly like the individual mandate in Obamacare. Common Core is the federal mandate in education,” she said. “Before, you had federal aggregates for schools and school districts but not individual students and teachers being tracked.”
Common Core mandates that each child must meet certain standards at each grade level.
That would be great if every child was the same, Hoge says.
“It’s creating the same standard for every student. It’s taken the bell curve and made it flat. So what happens next? To make sure everyone is meeting the same standards you eliminate grades, you eliminate timeframes, you dumb down the tests. You force everyone to be average.
“The reason all the parents and teachers are so upset is because this is the massive socialist system coming down on them, grading them, not on how well they teach but on things that are outside of their control.”
But testing a student’s grasp of reading, writing and arithmetic is only part of the plan that the education bureaucracy has for your child.
Attitudes and values
Testing for “attitudes and values” is something many parents are not even aware is going on in their schools.
How does the state “assess” a student’s honesty or integrity?
Common Core provides the answer with its “Grit” program.
Citing “changing workforce needs,” a U.S. Department of Education draft document from February 2013 titled “Promoting Grit, Tenacity, and Perseverance: Critical Factors for Success in the 21st Century” calls for public schools to cultivate “non-cognitive factors” in students, including “attributes, dispositions, social skills, attitudes” that are “independent of intellectual ability.”
The “Grit” perspective was included in the Common Core standards in 2013 and represents a “shift in educational priorities to promote not only content knowledge but also grit, tenacity and perseverance,” according to the DOE document.
“This brief explores the possibility that grit, tenacity, and perseverance can be malleable and teachable,” the summary of the document concludes.
“What they are doing is building a total psychological profile,” Hoge said. Any “weaknesses” in a child’s attitudes or values could then be targeted for “remediation.”
The only thing lacking then was a way to standardize the system and make sure teachers addressed various problem areas. Sufficient data was also lacking to drill down to the individual level of each teacher and student.
“That’s why Common Core had to be standardized across the 50 states,” Hoge said. “They had to translate and link the data so they were able to compare one school to another, one student to another, one teacher to another. So now we’re saying ‘stop the data collection.’”
If America’s schools are moving toward testing attitudes, values and opinions of its students, the obvious question Hoge and others are asking is, who will be the final authority in judging such subjective qualities in people? What are the guarantees the data won’t end up in the wrong hands?
“How much honesty is too much or not enough?” asks Hoge. “If these attitudes and values are found to be deficient, how are you going to remediate that? Who is the final authority? The parent or the state?”
Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt, former senior policy adviser with the U.S. Department of Education under President Ronald Reagan, thinks she knows the answer to those questions.
Iserbyt sees Common Core as just the latest in a long line of programs put forth over the decades by globalist elites intent on transforming America from a free-market to a socialist system. Schools have always been the preferred tool of implementation for such changes, she said.
‘Evil’ Common Core
“As evil as Common Core is, it’s a diversion,” said Iserbyt, author of several books including “The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America” and “Back to Basics Reform.”
The real genie in the bottle, she says, is the takeover of education by corporations pushing “school choice,” a very seductive concept to conservatives who have soured on traditional public education. But the schools would still be funded by tax dollars. The main difference, she said, would be that locally elected school boards would be shut down or stripped of any meaningful authority.
Iserbyt believes the burgeoning charter-school movement is being readied to create a pipeline of “school-to-work” graduates that fulfills the needs of corporations but does little to encourage real education.
It was called “mastery learning” in the 1960s and 70s and that morphed into “outcome-based education” in the 1980s and 90s with assessments to measure the outcomes.
Now the final building block has been introduced – Common Core. Unlike previous standards, teachers cannot ignore Common Core. They must comply because their evaluations are being tied directly to their students’ performance on the Common Core tests. If they weren’t teaching to the test before, they are now, Iserbyt said.
The Soviet and Chinese systems use the same model, Iserbyt said. The vast majority of children get “trained” for specific “outcomes” while traditional education is reserved for the top 10 percent of elite students. The global drive toward school-to-work, outcome-based training comes packaged with the full backing of the United Nations Educational and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and tax-exempt foundations funded by the Carnegie, Gates and Rockefeller families.
David Hornbeck, former chairman of the Carnegie Corporation, is one of the leading change agents” working in this realm. He described students as “human capital” to be trained for their appropriate place in the global economy in a 1993 book he edited under the title “Human Capital for America’s Future.”
“Community education is the plan, womb to tomb,” Iserbyt said. “Is it the value of the child that matters? No, it’s the value of that person to the state. You can train an animal, but only the human has the unique ability to be educated.”
Iserbyt traces the school-based plan to transform America from a capitalist to a socialist country to a little-known document funded by the Carnegie Corporation in 1934 called “Conclusions and Recommendations of the Commission on the Social Studies in Schools.”
On pages 16 and 17 of that book, the authors state:
“Under the moulding influence of socialized processes of living, drives of technology and
science, pressures of changing thought and policy, and disrupting impacts of economic disaster,
there is a notable waning of the once widespread popular faith in economic individualism; and
leaders in public affairs, supported by a growing mass of the population, are demanding the introduction into economy of ever-wider measures of planning and control.”
It goes on to say that “evidence supports the conclusion that, in the United States as in other countries, the age of individualism and laissez faire in economy and government is closing and that a new age of collectivism is emerging.”
The book predicts that individual economic actions and individual property rights “will be altered and abridged.”
Opting out gaining steam
“What we’re ending up with is their plan from 1934; it is going in place now. Everything is Carnegie,” Iserbyt said.
But if “opt out” and other grassroots movements continue to gain steam, then it’s not too late to save America’s education system from the central planners, she said.
Parents who resist or push back will face many challenges as the system tries to force its will upon them.
“Resisters have to be dealt with,” Iserbyt said. “I think they’re really upset because there’s a lot of opposition out there, but they’re clever. They could take our opposition and then pretend that they’re giving us something, maybe you can opt out but then you’ll have to let your child do a locally controlled assessment. Because how are they going to remediate for the work force, for the training, if they don’t have this data? This is a huge performance-based system, a global system. They have to have the data if they want the planned economy.”
Most states have laws demanding that all students take part in standardized assessments.
In Georgia, those who fail the test or refuse to take it are entitled to a hearing among the child’s teachers and principal, which will then vote on whether to pass the student to the next grade.
“Of course the parents often aren’t told they have the right to appeal,” Norris said.
The opt out groups are active and organized. They use Facebook to form groups that offer support and vital information on parental rights.
Norris posted May 3 on the Facebook page Opt Out Georgia: “The Georgia testing window is closed! Wow! What a ride! Parents, we will keep moving forward, ready to refuse retests, and helping prepare anyone with an appeals hearing. Next year we go full force on the refusal train. We are here, we are fighting, and we are legion.”
Reactions to the test refusals varied. Some parents were politely threatened with retention of their children, others were told they had a right to appeal. Some New York students who refused the test were reportedly required to “sit and stare” into a corner.
One school in Marietta, Ga., arranged for an opt-out parent to be met at the school by a police officer, who warned them they would be considered trespassers if their children did not take the test and escorted them out of the building.
Other schools in Georgia have punished children not taking the test by not allowing them to participate in end-of-year field trips.
Norris tells parents that Supreme Court rulings have a history of affirming parental rights dating back to the 19th century.
“Supreme Court decisions will always trump state law,” she said. “Parents have for years opted their children out of sex ed classes and this is no different.”
Desperate times
Estrada also believes desperate times call for desperate measures, and it’s about time the American people wake up and realize that local control of schools is slipping away.
“That’s the silver lining with Common Core. We are seeing something we haven’t seen in a long, long time, and that is parents standing up and saying ‘these are our children and we’re tired of the elites telling us how to educate them,’ and I think if we stay with this we could win,” he said. “And that’s why we see the intensity of the opposition. They’re used to parents just rolling over and giving up. And that’s just not happening on Common Core.
“I think they’re forgetting who the child belongs to. Children are not the little subjects of the state, and if the state says they should all get in line like good little soldiers, we have to realize that children are too important for that. These young people are more than just a data point. That’s why this battle must be fought and more power to the parents who are saying ‘we’re fed up and we’re going to opt them out of the test.’”

http://bwcentral.org/?p=28253&singlepage=1

http://bwcentral.org/?p=28253&singlepage=1

Report: Public Turning On Common Core

October 9, 2014 by Blake Neff

A new study financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation confirms support for Common Core is flagging as grassroots opposition flares up.

That’s bad news for the Gates Foundation and other Common Core supporters, who have been hoping that greater public knowledge of the multistate education standards would translate into stronger support rather than furious opposition.
The report, simply titled “Common Core State Standards in 2014,” was published Wednesday by the Center on Education Policy (CEP) at George Washington University. The Center surveyed superintendents in every state Common Core is being implemented in, seeking to assess how sentiments towards the standards have changed since an earlier survey was conducted in 2011, when states were adopting the now-controversial standards for the first time.
Five states have acted to eliminate or substantially modify Common Core in the past year, and many more have had bills under serious consideration. According to the report, this rising resistance to Common Core is pervasive at the local level and not limited to the statehouse.
When surveyed, 34 percent of district leaders described resistance from outside the school system as a major challenge to implementing Common Core, and another 39 percent described it as a minor challenge (18 percent said it was not a challenge at all).
That is a dramatic shift from 2011, when only 5 percent of district leaders said outside resistance was a major problem, 35 percent said it was a minor one, and 60 percent said it wasn’t a problem.
Internal resistance is rising as well. While in 2011, only 10 percent of district leaders said opposition from their own teachers and principals was hindering Common Core implementation, in three years that number has spiked to 25 percent.


This collectively rising opposition has made 62 percent of leaders concerned that state governments will abruptly pull the plug on Common Core just shortly after its implementation.
Nonetheless, the study maintains that despite rising opposition, school leaders remain supportive overall. Over 90 percent of school district leaders believe the standards are more academically rigorous than what came before, a large boost from 2011 when just over half thought so. More than three quarters also believe that the standards will boost student achievement in their schools.
However, all is not well even for district heads, who are adamant that more time, effort, and money than initially expected will be necessary for Common Core to work.

Over 80 percent of leaders say Common Core requires new or massively changed curricula and teaching standards, something only half of them thought in 2011. A whopping 90 percent were concerned that standardized tests aligned with Common Core are being rolled out too quickly, and could be used to penalize low-performing schools before they’ve had the chance to adapt.
The last concern is one that the Gates Foundation itself, a major backer of Common Core, has already acknowledged by calling for a general two-year freeze on using test scores to evaluate teachers and schools.








http://bwcentral.org/?p=35145


Surprise surprise!!!