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

Whenever you see the government and
big corporations working 'efficiently' together,
you can almost guarantee they're up to no good.

Examples: The sub-prime mess that was supposed
to give everyone their own home...All it did was
line the pockets of Wall Street - and Bush and Obama.

GMO seeds - 'Feeding the world' by patenting seeds
and creating frankenstein plants that could absorb
limitless amounts of pesticides.

Now they're selling us the "Common Core Curriculum."

Sounds good, right? It's not. Here's why...

Video:

http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/24672.html

- Brasscheck

P.S. Please share Brasscheck TV e-mails and
videos with friends and colleagues.



The corporate government's latest initiative
Now they're after your kids' ability to think




What's behind the Common Core Curriculum
From Germany to Communist China to the Soviet Union to the United States today, the elites have a goal:

Conformity uber alles.

Until recently, that's been hard to enforce. People can do "inconvenient" things like read and research and think for themselves.

Big Business and Big Government and their handmaidens in Big Education have a plan to remedy that.

The National Governors Association, the Gates Foundation, Intel, Microsoft, the World Bank, and the �learning company� Pearson are working hard together to bring a nightmare curriculum to fruition.

Their vision is one where techno-socialization, not knowledge gained from independent sources or critical thinking ability, is the top priority for education.

Documentarian Aaron Franz interviews education researcher Robin Eubanks about the Rotten Core Curriculum, and this video covers some of their main points in an excerpted form.

You can listen to the full interview at the following link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aaw03zSPy0
- See more at: http://www.brasschecktv.com/videos/m....uQt66wzS.dpuf

Tuesday, 01 October 2013 07:00 Expert Explores Link Between Federal Data Mining and Common Core

Written by Alex Newman





In an exclusive studio interview with The New American magazine’s Dr. Duke Pesta, Heartland Institute Education Research Fellow Joy Pullmann outlined the crucial link between the Obama-backed “Common Core” nationalization of schooling, the federally funded tests that go with the standards, and the vast data-gathering apparatus being erected by the administration to gather private information on U.S. students. The Common Core assessments, which have already been adopted by about four in five state governments, are a key element underpinning the entire scheme, she explained.

“The first thing people have to know is that testing is inseparable from Common Core,” said Pullmann, a leading analyst focused on the education “reform” agenda with the non-partisan Heartland Institute. “When governors signed a bunch of documents saying ‘yeah, we want to do this nationalization of education project,’ one of the things that they signed on to was the Common Core initiative, and they defined it as standards plus assessments. So those assessments, those tests, are the enforcement mechanism to make sure that Common Core gets into the minds and into the hands of teachers and children in the classrooms.”

There are currently two testing consortia developing Common Core assessments for state governments with federal tax dollars, the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) and the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC). Several state governments have started to withdraw from the testing schemes following massive public outcries, but both organizations are marching full speech ahead despite the growing outrage among parents, teachers, and experts.

As part of the agreements signed between state governments and the federally backed consortia, Pullmann explained in the interview, data gathered on children at school will be provided to the organizations. As an example of the types of data being sought, she said one of the consortia was interested in information on “student behavior, their attitudes, their persistence, their discipline, and so forth — a lot of non-academic things that a lot of parents aren't comfortable with.”

“The reason I call this the student-data pipeline is because states have promised these organizations they'll give this information to them — it's basically a blank check; whatever information they think is necessary,” Pullmann explained. “And they've promised that they'll change their state laws or their regulations according to whatever is necessary to get that carried out.”

Because the testing regime is funded by the U.S. taxpayers via federal government, meanwhile, the assessment consortia have promised to deliver the information they gather on students to bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., she added. The agreement between the Obama administration's Education Department and the two testing organizations it funds, excerpted in the video interview, puts it succinctly: “The grantee must provide timely and complete access to any and all data collected at the state level to ED [the U.S. Department of Education].”

“We have a mass of student information available and open and unprotected — personal information about kids — that is literally being collected by Common Core,” Pullman continued. Indeed, as she points out in the interview, the administration has essentially re-written federal privacy regulations — without approval from Congress — to claim that information on children can be shared without parental knowledge or consent.

Aside from the data-mining schemes, Pullmann said other problems with nationalizing education through Common Core include the fact that it enhances the education monopoly already held by government. That will allow special interests, which invariably seek out power sources, to push their agenda more easily. “Just creating that sort of structure for education really makes it inevitable that bad things are going to be perpetuated on everybody beneath that structure," she said, citing the history of humanity to illustrate the argument against creating such centers of power to begin with.

Beyond that, the agenda goes even deeper. “The real goal is social engineering,” Pullmann said, echoing widespread concerns among Common Core critics across the political spectrum. “I don't like to use explosive sorts of things like that, but this is very obvious — the goal is to create a workforce that responds to the needs of the 21st century, as determined by the central planners.”

Dr. Pesta, who also serves as academic director at FreedomProject Education and an English professor at the University of Wisconsin, recently compared the effort to impose Common Core and associated government schemes on the American people to a frog being boiled alive over time. In the latest interview, he said that FPE, an online K-12 school offering classical education, has been working with Catholic schools. Many have been adopting Common Core standards in the mistaken belief that it would not pull them closer to the federal government, which Pesta noted had become increasingly hostile to Christianity and religious freedom.

For more information on Common Core, Dr. Pesta suggests exploring TheNewAmerican.com, which has been staying on top of major developments, and checking out the Heartland Institute’s page at www.heartland.org/common-core.

^{Photo at top: Dr. Duke Pesta interviewing Joy Pullmann}

Media



More in this category: « Strategies to Defeat Common Core Education Gain Momentum


1 comment

• Comment Link Tuesday, 01 October 2013 23:32 posted by Nora There is absolutely no need or reason for the government to have that much information on minor children or anyone else for that matter. The potential for abuse is plain for anyone to see. We need to pull our kids out of the disaster called "public education" and home school them, because if we don't they will be indoctrinated with socialist values, and unable to perform simple math, read, write or think critically. That's the goal of Common Core; to make children dumbed-down mindless slaves. A good bit of a child's formative years will be spent learning useless drills and blind obedience, if we don't stop this Common Core process of social control in its tracks.

http://thenewamerican.com/culture/ed...nd-common-core

When I think of the school system
I see to things:

1. Massive, uncontrolled fraud and waste

2. Active dumbing down and even
harassment of anyone who doesn't
toe the part line.

A recent example from California.

Video:

http://www.2ndamendmenttv.com/page/24730.html

- Brasscheck

P.S. Please share Brasscheck TV e-mails and
videos with friends and colleagues.

That's how we grow. Thanks.



'Take off that T-shirt!'
Calif. high school bullies straight-A student


'They were treating me like
I was a criminal.'

Among the states of the American Southwest, California restricts the Second Amendment the most.

Sadly California's restrictions on the Second Amendment have bled over into restrictions on the First.

A security guard escorted Haley Bullwinkle, a sophomore at Anaheim's Canyon High, to the principal's office. Why?

Because she was wearing an NRA T-shirt -- one celebrating firearms in the context of a proud U.S. hunting tradition.

While the school claimed that depictions of guns were banned, Haley's father rightfully replied that the school's drill team was allowed to twirl fake rifles. And if deterring "divisiveness" were a rightful excuse, what of the school's Native American mascot?

Since this report came out, a happy ending is that the school has apologized -- unfortunately, not before the father mentioned having shelled out to retain an attorney.




- See more at: http://www.2ndamendmenttv.com/videos....dYvPnZNY.dpuf

Utah parents charged with vetting Common Core tests being sworn to secrecy

Posted by EAGNEWS on Oct 5, 2013

SALT LAKE CITY – Leave it to government bureaucrats to think that government transparency efforts should somehow be shrouded in secrecy when vetting Common Core testing.


That’s exactly what’s happening in Utah, where state education officials are asking members of a parent review committee tasked with scrutinizing the new Common Core-aligned standardized tests “to sign a nondisclosure agreement that could muzzle them from discussing the test questions with other parents,” reports The Salt Lake Tribune.


But some state lawmakers say the nondisclosure agreements will prevent committee members from making any public statements about what they discover through the review committee, thus undermining the purpose of the review committee.

The parent review committee is a creation of the state Legislature. The committee is meant to address Utah residents’ fears that the new Common Core math and English learning standards will advance a secular and left-wing political and cultural agenda.

The Utah Board of Education, however, worries that parents involved in the Common Core test review will publicly reveal test questions, which would compromise the integrity of the tests. That’s why they’re pushing the secrecy agreements.

Republican state Sen. Mark Madsen believes it’s oxymoronic to have a transparency group that’s sworn to secrecy, and he’s calling for the end of the nondisclosure requirement. While Madsen agrees that parents shouldn’t be allowed to reveal specific test questions, he believes the nondisclosure deals will effectively prevent all public discussion of the committee’s findings.

“We need to give these parents the freedom to speak about their experiences,” Madsen told the Tribune. “The parents are there representing all the parents of the state. … Transparency is always the better option.”

Democratic state Sen. Jim Dabakis agreed.
“Why wouldn’t you allow a process where (parents) could say, ‘This is the dumbest thing imaginable and this is why’?” Dabakis said.
It’s unclear if Madsen and Dabakis will use legislation to address this concern, should state K-12 leaders keep the ridiculous policy in place.

State Schools Superintendent Martell Menlove “didn’t immediately suggest a way to reconcile the need to keep test questions in secret with the need for transparency,” the Tribune reports. “He had learned of Madsen’s concerns just hours earlier, he said.”

There’s still time to fix the nonsensical policy, as the parent review committee is still being formed.
By Ben Velderman at EAGnews.org

Read more at http://joeforamerica.com/2013/10/uta...BmK4IiTwzW0.99

related

http://www.alipac.us/f9/obamanation-289088/#post1372831

Obama Disobeys the Law of the Land

Common Core 2.0, Oregon’s “P20W” Project Goes Prenatal





Educators would teach womb to workforce

October 10, 2013
by Benjamin Nanke

Oregon – Common Core State Standards, the new nationwide education plan that has been garnering major criticism for it’s heavily intrusive nature, data collection, and top-down control, has been taken to the next level by educators through a program called P20W, which would begin preparing children for education while they are still in their mother’s womb.
In a video posted on October 7th, 2013, Oregon Deputy Superintendent Rob Saxton who is, for all intents and purposes, the head of the Oregon Department of Education, spoke at a school gathering to discuss new education procedures. These included Common Core, as well as the lesser known “improvement” on Common Core called P20W. We’ll explain what exactly that is in a moment.
The key details about Mr. Saxton, however, are that he was not elected to his position, but instead appointed by the Oregon Superintendent of Public Instruction in July of 2012. However, after a revolutionary 2011 overhaul of the Oregon educational system, the position of Superintendent of Public Instruction was abolished, and the authority of that position was turned over to Governor John Kitzhaber.
According to Saxton, it’s his job to run the Department of Education while the Governor/Superintendent is off doing other work, “like the special sessions,” Saxton said. Governor Kitzhaber recently called a special legislative session to discuss public education, during which legislators allocated $100M to Oregon public schools.
Now, when attempting to understand P20W, we first need to think of our current vernacular for education. For public schools, the common term is “K-12.” Recently, it has even been expanded to “K-16.”
P20W follows that naming scheme.
P – Prenatal (not a typo – literally in the womb)
20 – “Grade” 20. According to Saxton, this is Graduate School. However, the last year of a doctorate program would only be considered Grade 19, so Grade 20, more aptly, is…
W – Workforce
P20W.
Watch the video, discovered and edited by concerned Oregon parent Jason Schmidt, of Ron Saxton explaining the reasoning and procedures behind the P20W program.



Published on Oct 7, 2013
Who is Rob Saxton? What is his role in Common Core?

Oregon's Deputy Superintendent, Rob Saxton, spoke at a PTA meeting on October 5th. He talked about the newly adopted P20 system. This system will now control your child's information and data from prenatal (still in the womb) to age 20. Yes, I said Prenatal.

In the video, Saxton states that “we should be thinking about education from the time that a woman enters, you know, is pregnant, so prenatal, and just like: what their nutrition looks like, what their exercise looks like, what kind of education we can provide working around the child.”

Despite how strange this may seem, much of what Saxton is proposing in the video is within the Department of Education’s jurisdiction.
“The last legislative session moved early childhood into the Department of Education,” Saxton said. He is correct. The bill in question is HB 3234, which passed both the Oregon House and Senate by a wide margin during the 2013 legislative session with bipartisan support.
Saxton, laying out several goals of the project (including teaching students to read by the third grade) states that he used to think the challenge was a “hair-on-fire emergency” from kindergarten to the end of third grade. Now, however, he realizes that the time period is actually prenatal to the end of third grade. He says that, from birth, the Department of Education can work with parents to teach pre-reading skills, and that early childhood schooling like Kindergarten should be less like “day care” and more like education. Saxton also alludes to a large amount of funding provided to work on this effort. The source of this money is currently unknown.
The website “Stop Common Core In Oregon” has done a write-up on the history and impact of P20W, including how the data collected on students can be accessed by almost anyone affiliated, directly or indirectly, with the school district, for any reason provided that they “[need] to review an education record in order to fulfill [their] professional responsibility.”
P20W is not exclusively an Oregon program. This is an experimental part of the national Common Core State Standards program, and could be in the beginning stages of implementation in states across the country. WatchdogWire encourages readers from other states to research P20W in their own state and report on the findings.
WatchdogWire – Northwest will continue watching this story and provide updates when more information is available.
Benjamin Nanke

Benjamin Nanke is the Regional Editor for Watchdog Wire - Northwest.
More Posts - Website - Twitter



Categories: Education, Must Read
Tags: Common Core, education, Governor Kitzhaber, John Kitzhaber, oregon, P20W, Pregnant, Prenatal, Public, Rob Saxton, rudy crew, School, Special Session, Superintendent, Womb
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http://watchdogwire.com/northwest/2013/10/10/common-core-2-0-oregons-p20-project-goes-prenatal/

March 25, 2013 The Ambitions of Bill and Melinda Gates: Controlling Population and Public Education


by Anne Hendershott


Continuing their commitment to controlling global population growth through artificial contraception, sterilization, and abortion initiatives, Microsoft founder and philanthropist, Bill Gates and his wife, Melinda, a self-described “practicing” Catholic, are now attempting to control the curriculum of the nation’s public schools. Subsidizing the Common Core State Standards in English language arts and mathematics, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has committed more than $76 million to support teachers in implementing the Common Core—a standardized national curriculum. This, on top of the tens of millions they have already awarded to the National Governor’s Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers to develop the Common Core in the first place.
Working collaboratively with the Obama administration, the Gates Foundation subsidized the creation of a national curriculum for English and mathematics that has now been adopted by 46 states, and the District of Columbia—despite the fact that the General Education Provisions Act, the Department of Education Organization Act, and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act all protect states against such an intrusion by the United States Department of Education.
The Common Core Standards were developed by an organization called Achieve, and the National Governors Association—both of which were funded by the Gates Foundation. The standards have been imposed on the states without any field testing, and little or no input from those involved in implementing the standards. In a post entitled “Why I Cannot Support the Common Core Standards,” educational policy analyst and New York University Research Professor, Diane Ravitch, wrote that the standards “are being imposed on the children of this nation despite the fact that no one has any idea how they will affect students, teachers or schools…Their creation was neither grassroots nor did it emanate from the states.”
Ravitch is especially concerned about the content of the curriculum—what she called the “flap over fiction vs. informational text.” Rather than giving English teachers the freedom to teach literature, the Common Core mandates that a far greater percentage of classroom time be spent on “fact-based” learning. Ravitch’s concerns are shared by others. For example, one teacher claimed that she had to give up having her students read Shakespeare in favor of Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point because it was “fact-based” and Shakespeare was not. Of course, Tipping Point has a political agenda. Parents may be concerned if they were to learn that Gladwell suggests such “facts” as the belief that parents should stop worrying about their children’s “experimentation with drugs,” including cocaine because “it seldom leads to hardcore use.”
“Fact-based” books on climate change are also replacing classic works of literature because they are viewed as offering students an opportunity to learn “science.” Freakonomics—a book that has already been a favorite of public school teachers—is preferable to Poe because students will learn about the positive effects of abortion on reducing crime rates by reducing the population of those more likely to commit crime.
While the adoption of the Common Core was “voluntary” by the 46 states that adopted it, it was well understood by these states that they would not be eligible for Race to the Top funding ($4.35 billion) unless they adopted the Common Core standards. The Gates Foundation was very much a part of this. According to Lyndsey Layton of the Washington Post (December 2, 2012), “the Gates Foundation invested tens of millions of dollars in the effort…The Obama administration kicked the notion into high gear when it required states to adopt the common core—or an equivalent—in order to compete for Race to the Top grant funds.”
Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post recently reported (February 26, 2013) that there is growing resistance. Alabama, for example, withdrew from the two consortia that are working on creating standardized tests aligned with the standards. Indiana, which adopted the Common Core in 2010 under the state education superintendent Tony Bennett, is now talking about a “pause” in the implementation of the curriculum. Bennett was defeated in the November elections by an educator who opposed Bennett’s support for the Common Core.
Now, there are concerns that the imposition of the Common Core within the public schools could threaten the autonomy of private schools, religious schools and home schools. An op-ed published in the Orange County Register by Robert Holland, claims that the Common Core could “morph into a national curriculum that will stifle the family-centered creativity that has fostered high rates of achievement and growth for home education…Many private and parochial schools—including those of the 100 Roman Catholic dioceses across the nation, already are adopting the CCSS prescriptions for math and English classes…Their debatable reasoning is that the rush of most state governments to embrace the national standards means publishers of textbooks and tests will fall in line, thereby leaving private schools with no practical alternatives for instructional materials. According to October 8, 2012 article in Education Week by Erik Robelin, it is not just Catholic schools that are adopting the Common Core, some Lutheran and other denominations of Christian schools are shifting to the common core, including Grand Rapids Christian in Michigan and the Christian Academy School System in Louisville, KY. According to Robelin, parochial school leaders claim that they must “remain competitive” with public schools and now feel pressured to adopt the Core. These are real concerns. As Diane Ravitch points out, “Now that David Coleman, the primary architect of the Common Core standards has become president of the College Board, we can expect that SAT will be aligned to the standards. No one will escape their reach, whether they attend public or private school.”
On February 14, 2013, Missouri legislator Kurt Bahr filed HB616 that prohibits the State Board of Education from implementing the Common Core for public schools developed by the Common Core Initiative or any other statewide education standards without the approval of the General Assembly. An increasing number of parents are voicing their concerns. For example, Tiffany Mouritsen, a Utah mother, blogged that the American Institutes for Research (AIR), the primary source for Common Core testing is a major concern for her: “AIR markets its values which includes promoting lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual agenda for teens, and publicizes its client list (including George Soros and Bill and Melinda Gates).” In a column published in January, political commentator Michelle Malkin calls the Common Core a “stealthy federal takeover of school curriculum and standards across the country.” And, she maintains that the Common Core’s “dubious college and career read standards undermine local control of education, usurp state autonomy over curricular materials, and foist untested, mediocre and incoherent pedagogical theories on America’s schoolchildren.
The Gates Foundation: Buying Control
The promise of federal funds to states in order to “encourage” them to adopt the Common Core is nothing new. Our government has been doing this both nationally and internationally for decades. In a 2008 book entitled Fatal Misconception, author Matthew Connelly writes that in the 1960s, President Lyndon Johnson leveraged food aid for family planning during crop failures in India, thus creating an incentive for the sterilization program. India’s Ministry of Health and Family Planning admitted that, “The large number of sterilizations and IUD insertions during 1967-68 was due to drought conditions.” Eventually, more sophisticated incentives such as bicycles and radios were used to encourage women to accept sterilization. Connelly writes that under Indira Gandhi in the mid-1970s sterilization became a condition not just for land allotments, but for irrigation water, electricity, ration cards, rickshaw licenses, medical care, pay raises and promotions. There were sterilization quotas—especially for the Dalits (the untouchable caste) who were targeted for family planning.
While the Gates Foundation has not been involved in anything this coercive, they have indeed been very much involved in giving aid to those countries willing to participate in family planning initiatives. For nearly two decades, the Gates Foundation has been generous in providing aid to more than 100 countries—often coupled with family planning opportunities. Such aid is often framed as a way to foster economic growth. In an article in American Thinker, Andressen Blom and James Bell wrote that Melinda Gates made that connection explicit in a speech at a population gathering that “government leaders are now beginning to understand that providing access to contraceptives is a cost effective way to foster economic growth.”
Bill Gates revealed his own population goals in February, 2010, at the invitation-only Technology, Entertainment and Design Conference in Long Beach, California, when he gave his keynote speech on global warming: “Innovating to Zero!” In a youtube video available here, Gates stated that CO2 emissions must be reduced to zero by 2050 and advised those in attendance that population had much to do with the increase in CO2. Claiming that each individual on the planet puts out an average of about five tons of CO2 per year, Gates stated that “Somehow we have to make changes that will bring that down to zero…It has been constantly going up. It’s only various economic changes that have even flattened it at all.” To illustrate, Gates presented the following equation: CO2 (total population emitted CO2 per year) = P (people) x S (services per person) x E (average energy per service) x C (average CO2 emitted per unit of energy). Gates told the audience that “probably one of these numbers is going to have to get pretty near to zero. That’s a fact from high school algebra.” For Gates, the P (population) portion of the equation is the most important: “If we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent.”
Gates maintains that improvements in health care—including an expansion of the administration of vaccinations—will encourage families to reduce the number of children they desire to have. And, in an ongoing attempt to expand the types of birth control, Gates has spent millions of dollars on research and development. According to Christian Voice, a few years ago the Gates Foundation awarded a grant of $100,000 to researchers at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, to develop a new type of ultrasound described as a “non-invasive form of birth control for men” which would make a man infertile for up to six months.
Such strategies have been effective. In fact, the Gates Foundation has been so successful in their family planning initiatives that the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) awarded their annual Population Award in 2010 to the Foundation. According to a June 15, 2010 article in Mercator.net, at the awards ceremony, UNFPA executive director Thoraya Obaid cited the Gates Foundation as a “leader in the fields of global health and global development, particularly in promoting excellence in population assistance, including through the design of innovative, integrated solutions in the areas of reproductive health, family planning, and maternal and neonatal health.” The International Planned Parenthood Federation is a previous winner of the United Nations Population Fund’s Annual Award.
It is easy to understand why the United Nations Population Fund—a fund which Steven Mosher, the President of the Population Research Institute has exposed as being a direct participant in China’s coercive one-child policy—honored Gates with their prestigious Population Fund award since the Gates Foundation has donated more than one billion dollars to “family-planning” groups including the United Nations Population Fund itself; CARE International—an organization which is lobbying for legalized abortion in several African nations; Save the Children—a major promoter of the population control agenda, the World Health Organization—an organization that forcibly sterilized thousands of women in the 1990s under the pretence of providing tetanus vaccination services in Nicaragua, Mexico and the Philippines; and of course, the major abortion provider, International Planned Parenthood Federation.
Bill and Melinda Gates truly believe that population control is key to the future. Plans are already in place to track births and vaccinations through cell phone technology to register every birth on the planet. Gates claims that the GPS technology would enable officials to track and “remind” parents who do not bring their children in for vaccines. Maintaining that vaccination is key to reducing population growth, Gates predicts that if child mortality can be reduced, parents will have fewer children, following the example of the urbanized West where birth rates have dropped to below replacement levels: “The fact is that within a decade of improving health outcomes, parents decide to have fewer children.” For Gates, “there is no such thing as a healthy, high population growth country. If you’re healthy, you’re low-population growth… As the world grows from 6 billion to 9 billion, all of that population growth is in urban slums…It’s a very interesting problem.”
More than a decade ago, on May 17, 2002, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation had purchased shares in nine of the largest pharmaceutical companies valued at nearly $205 million. Acquiring shares in Merck, Pfizer, Johnson and Johnson Wyeth, Abbott Labs, and others, the Gates Foundation continues a financial interest in common with the makers of AIDS drugs, diagnostic tools, vaccines, and contraceptives. But, the commitment to global population control goes well beyond financial interests. It is likely that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will continue its commitment to global population control, and now, curriculum creation in the nation’s schools because they truly believe that they know better than anyone else how we all should live.
A Product of Poor Catholic Education
It is difficult to believe the claims of Bill and Melinda Gates that they are not involved in the abortion industry when you look at the relationships they have with organizations like the International Planned Parenthood Federation—the largest abortion provider in the world. According to the National Catholic Register, Melinda Gates represents herself in the media as a practicing Catholic who has a great uncle who was a Jesuit priest and a great aunt who was an Ursuline nun who taught her to read. She graduated from Ursuline Academy in Dallas, where she claims to have learned “incredible social justice.” And, this may indeed be where the problem begins. For so many Catholics, social justice has been so broadly defined that it now includes giving women access to reproductive rights—including the right to abortion—so that they can play an equal role in contributing to the workplace and the economy. In an article entitled “Why Birth Control is Still a Big Idea” published in Foreign Policy in December, 2012, Melinda Gates writes:

Contraceptives unlock one of the most dormant but potentially powerful assets in development: women as decision makers. When women have the power to make choices about their families, they tend to decide precisely what demographers, economists, and development experts recommend.

Most recently, in a January 2, 2013 article published on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation website entitled “Profiles in Courage: Philippines Passes Reproductive Health Bill,” the article congratulates all of those who helped bring expanded access to “reproductive health” through the Responsible Parenthood and Reproductive Health Act of 2012—recently signed by President Aquino. This bill states that women and men—living in the most Catholic of Catholic countries—can now “decide freely and responsibly the number and spacing of their children.” What the Gates Foundation website omits is information about the provision within the bill involving “population management” through mandatory counseling of couples seeking marriage licenses. In this case, social justice involves a demand that couples learn about the government’s views on an ideal family size of two children—coming one step closer to China in its government’s one-child policy.
This commitment to a distorted definition of social justice by Melinda and Bill Gates will likely continue because they have been lead to believe that such control is what is best for people. The Core Curriculum is really just another component of population control—it is used to help teach children the “facts” about climate change and problems of over-population. Indeed, the population agenda is a trap that many wealthy, highly intelligent people have fallen into in the past. From the wealthy eugenics supporters of Planned Parenthood’s Founder Margaret Sanger, to the Rockefeller family and their population control initiatives, this work continues today through their heirs—heirs like David Rockefeller—an ally of Bill and Melinda Gates. And some influential Catholics have been complicit in this. At one time, Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, President Emeritus of the University of Notre Dame served as a trustee, and later, Chairman of the Board of the Rockefeller Foundation, a funder of population causes counter to the teachings of the Church.
The population control initiatives promoted by the Gates Foundation will continue to grow nationally and internationally because they have convinced others and themselves that they are saving lives. On their website, they ask: “what is more life affirming than saving one third of mothers from dying in childbirth?” What they do not seem to acknowledge is how many unborn children have died from their initiatives.
Tagged as: Bill Gates, Climate Change, Common Core, Obama Administration, population control, public education, UNFPA


The views expressed by the authors and editorial staff are not necessarily the views of
Sophia Institute, Holy Spirit College, or the Thomas More College of Liberal Arts.

http://www.crisismagazine.com/2013/t...blic-education

Is this the next Common Core?


Thursday, Oct 17, 2013 at 4:52 PM PDT



Think Common Core is bad – wait until you hear about Imagining America, a national consortium of 90 campuses that Glenn believes could be America’s next progressive propaganda machine.

Imagining America was created through the White House Millennium Council, which was initiated under Bill Clinton in 1998 through an executive order. Their membership includes over 90 universities, including Columbia, NYU, Brown, University of Chicago, University of Washington, and UC Santa Barbara—all of whom receive grants from the Tides Foundation.
Using publicly available video, Glenn showed what some of the people involved want to do with the program. They discussed changing the face of government by getting radicals to run for office and involved with changing policy. They discussed redistribution of wealth, inequality, and oppression.
Many of their members have ties to George Soros. Pam Korza, for example, an advisory board member, is actually the co-director of the Soros funded Animating Democracy. Other members have written progressive texts and have ties to a wide range of connections including government organizations, universities, corporations, and more.
Imagining America openly admits to collaborating with “a whole domain of robust organizations with which higher education-based scholars and artists [can] collaborate” –meaning the Tides supported universities, and also what they call “non-academic cultural” organizations such as the Animating Democracy Initiative founded in 1996, The Community Arts Network founded in 1999, and the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience founded in 1999 – all of whom receive funds from George Soros’ Open Society Foundation.
The organization is also closely tied to the new United States Department of Arts and Culture, a group that Glenn claims is the new Progressive propaganda arm. It’s not a real government organization, but it sure seems to want to act like one. The group seeks to use the arts to promote “cultural equity” and a “democratic media”. Glenn said that they also want to re-create and rewrite our history using “observation, improvisation, innovation, resourcefulness, and creativity.”
There were several alarming pieces of information that Glenn and his team were able to find out about Imagining America, but perhaps the most concerning things were there efforts to rewrite and shape history. At their 2013 Conference, the group hosted a panel called “Claiming the Past, Creating the Future” that sought to “step into history and actively participate in documenting the past from the vantage point of the present to articulate a socially just future”.
While this group has become as pervasive as Common Core, Glenn said people need to be aware of what is happening early before they have a chance to grow their influence and rewrite history through indoctrination.

2 videos at link below

http://www.glennbeck.com/2013/10/17/..._267812_267822

Education
Glenn Beck ‘Horrified’ by ‘America’s Latest Propaganda Machine’

Oct. 17, 2013 8:30pm Erica Ritz

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Glenn Beck on Thursday broached a topic that he said “horrified” him when it was brought to his attention roughly two weeks ago, describing it as an “effort to re-write our history and catalyze a new culture for America” with the help of “America’s latest propaganda machine.”

Beck proceeded to tell his viewers about two groups, the first called “Imagining America” and the second called “The U.S. Department of Arts and Culture.”

The latter isn’t actually a body of the United States government, but in the group’s own words, “the nation’s newest people-powered department, founded on the truth that art and culture are our most powerful and under-tapped resources for social change.”

Beck highlighted various individuals affiliated with the organizations, who he described as “the people that will be teaching and influencing your children” through “art and music and film and history books.”

Among the topics the individuals were caught on tape discussing was the fair redistribution of wealth and how “we’re funding the arts through the Cultural Development Fund, which is upwards of $20-some-odd million funding our cultural communities.”
Beck also said Imagining America was created by Bill Clinton, and that its membership now includes roughly 90 universities including Columbia University, Brown University, the University of Chicago, and more.

Many receive funds from the Soros-linked Tides Foundation, Beck added, in addition to various government grants.
“Several of the board members work closely with the government, what a surprise!” Beck remarked. “…So we have the government, radicals, and the universities, and some of their affiliates are actually public officials. They actually hold conferences and presentations about how to re-author American history, and it’s [funded] by you.”

Watch more of Beck’s explanation, below:
Complimentary Clip from TheBlaze TV

Beck said the entire scenario “looks uncomfortably … [like] the Ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment,” the government agency used to enforce and regulate the culture of Nazi Germany in the 1940′s.

“This is exactly what Germany was doing. They re-imagined history with a look to the social frontier,” he said. “This is exactly what this group is doing. You need to tell your friends and if they don’t believe you, doesn’t matter. You need to keep your eye on these people.”

Beck said the history of the United States will be turned “into a story full of evil and hatred,” and that your kids are already not learning history, without any new efforts.

“[And] I have news for you, we never learned history, and you know it if you’ve watched me for a long time,” he added. “The facts that we have shown you tell you that you already were indoctrinated, but now we’re going to take this to a whole new level.”

“We have got to start putting our money and our heads together,” Beck implored. “We have got to start putting our best minds together and look for a big picture. We’re talking about, ‘Can we save the sequester of 2%.’ They’re talking about changing the world!‘”
Complimentary Clip from TheBlaze TV

Beck has long maintained the solution to the country’s problems will come from the American people and the pulpit, and invited Pastor Rafael Cruz – the father of Texas Senator Ted Cruz (R) – to weigh in on the issue.

“We could talk about all the things the world wants to talk about, your son and everything else, but I want to talk to you about – the answer is not going to come from Washington,” Beck began.

“Absolutely not,” Cruz, who fled communist Cuba as a young man, remarked. “It will come from we the people.”

The pastor added that listening to Beck’s remarks earlier in the program, it was almost like listening to what happened in Cuba under Castro.
You have a “ministry of misinformation…in all the communist countries,” he said. “Did you know, Glenn, we have a ministry of misinformation in this country? It’s called the liberal media. They just tell us what they want us to hear, and they are re-writing history.”


Cruz added that in looking at our history today, many would not know that “every one of those 27 grievances in the Declaration of Independence of King George were preached from the pulpits of America before they were written.”

Today, not only do many not know the history behind the Declaration of Independence, but the most recognized lines of it are often distorted. Cruz specifically referenced instances where the president has said “we are endowed” with certain inalienable rights, omitting the phrase “by our Creator.”

“Socialism, Marxism requires that government become your God, so they must destroy the concept of God,” Cruz said. “But you know Glenn, if those rights come from government, they are not inalienable.”

When asked what his message is, Cruz remarked: “My message is the pulpit is responsible, like Charles Finney said it very clearly – he was one of the leaders in the Second Great Awakening – if evil prevails in the halls of Congress, the pulpit is responsible for it. If we have moral decay in our society, the pulpit is responsible for it. As shepherds, we have a greater responsibility to be leaders, not to be following.”

But despite the challenges, Cruz said he is not discouraged and referenced a verse in the book of Proverbs that says though the righteous falls seven times, he gets up again.

“We either stay down there feeling sorry for ourselves, or we get up, wipe our bloody nose, and move forward with twice the determination,” he said strongly. “That’s what vision will do for you. And when that vision becomes a passion, when it becomes fire in your heart, fire in your bones, nothing can stop you, Glenn…That gives me hope.”

Complimentary Clip from TheBlaze TV

The full episode of The Glenn Beck Program, along with many other live streaming shows and thousands of hours of on-demand content, is available on just about any digital device. Get it all with a FREE TRIAL.
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013...ganda-machine/

Friday, 18 October 2013 14:38 Education Expert: Common Core Education is Social Engineering

Written by Alex Newman


With the national uproar over the Obama administration-backed “Common Core” nationalization of education reaching a fever pitch from Florida and Louisiana to New Hampshire and Wisconsin, education expert Dr. Duke Pesta is now speaking out in an exclusive video for The New American about the looming nationwide school standards for history, science, and sexuality. The goal of it all, according to Dr. Pesta, academic director at FreedomProject Education and an English professor at the University of Wisconsin, is social engineering while denying truth — an argument that numerous other prominent experts and educators across the country have also made.

“Many states across the union are having second thoughts,” said Pesta, who oversees academics at FPE, an online K-12 school offering classical education to students across the country. “They see the English and the math standards that are already in our schools, and they’re just a heap of trouble. The math standards aren’t real math. The English standards are involving all sorts of things that aren’t really literature — all of this tangential political material.”

Indeed, it started as a mere handful of states that refused taxpayer-funded bribes from Obama’s Department of Education in exchange for adopting the deeply controversial standards — Alaska, for example, and Texas. As the public slowly learns about Common Core and what it means, however, outrage is boiling over all across the country — and the pro-Common Core establishment is frantically trying to clamp down.

In multiple states, official hearings in recent days and weeks have drawn legions of furious educators and parents demanding an end to Common Core. A recent hearing in Wisconsin, where Dr. Pesta testified against the scheme, featured testimony from a member of the Common Core Validation Committee who refused to sign off on the English standards. Now, however, as information about the bid to nationalize education in other fields emerges as well, the picture is not pretty — and resistance is expected to intensify.

“We have word of a pending danger,” explained Dr. Pesta, a contributor to The New American magazine, in an in-studio video about the future of Common Core and related efforts. “We now have a sense of what the health standards are going to look like, what the science standards are going to look like, and what the history standards are going to look like. They are as bad, or worse, than what we already have.”

As an example, Dr. Pesta cited the national so-called “health” standards, developed largely by tax-funded abortion behemoth Planned Parenthood, “which advertise teaching our kids health and sexuality skills from kindergarten to 12th grade,” he explained. “I don’t know about you, but the idea that we’re going to send our kids to public schools to learn sexuality skills is very disturbing.” One of the numerous complaints is that children will be required to “identify different kinds of family structures” — read: homosexual and transgender — and “provide arguments as to why all different types of families are equal.”

The consequences of the radical “health” and “sexuality” schemes being foisted on impressionable young children “are grave,” Dr. Pesta said, noting that only the government’s view would be taught. “No longer do moms and dads get to educate their kids at home about their views on sexuality,” he said, citing Christians and members of other faiths. “The state standards mandate that every kid in kindergarten, first, and second grade engage in these exercises.” By the time kids reach third grade, he continued, they will have to make arguments explaining why “there is no such thing as gender biology.”

Speaking about the standards on alleged “world history,” financed by billionaire globalist Bill Gates, Dr. Pesta noted that it is broken into two sections — and the first half has nothing to do with human beings. “It is a pseudo-scientific overlay that is designed to make your kids atheists and materialists, to promote an absolutely materialist paradigm when it comes to globalism; it’s highly environmentalist,” he said. “This is what’s going to pass for history.”

Gates, the key financier behind Common Core as well as a strong supporter of the United Nations and Planned Parenthood, has also been funding Orwellian technology to monitor and track students for data-mining purposes — all of which will be shared with government. The most recent controversy around Gates-funded technology aimed at your children: so-called “Galvanic Skin Response” (GSR) bracelets, which track physiological reactions to “measure engagement” of kids in the classroom.

In the short video, Dr. Pesta also addressed the deeply controversial so-called “science” standards. As The New American has previously documented, the “Next Generation Science Standards” are filled with unscientific propaganda on everything from United Nations “man-made global warming” theories to evolution. “Human activities, such as the release of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels, are major factors in the current rise in Earth’s mean surface temperature (global warming),” the elementary-school standards claim, despite the fact that even climate alarmists admit there has been no “global warming” in over 15 years and that CO2 released from fossil fuels represents a fraction of one percent of the greenhouse gases present naturally in the atmosphere.

For Dr. Pesta and other experts, the trends and the real agenda behind the nationalization of schooling are clear. “It is an education that fundamentally denies truth, not just in the humanities and history, but alarmingly, as we’ve seen, in science, math, and biology,” said Dr. Pesta. “It’s all done for social engineering aims,” he added. “This is what’s coming. Common Core is bad now — it’s going to get a lot, lot worse.”

However, despite the progress Common Core plotters have made, analysts say the tide may be turning — and that the pushback is set to accelerate as Americans learn more. In testimony before an official Wisconsin committee investigating Common Core, Dr. Pesta and other experts slammed the controversial standards and urged lawmakers to reject them. What would happen if rather than Bill Gates, conservative billionaires had instead dumped hundreds of millions into developing national standards, backed by a right-wing presidential administration, he asked rhetorically.

Pesta also noted that both of the subject-matter experts on the Common Core Validation Committee — one of whom, Dr. Sandra Stotsky, also testified against the standards at the same hearing — had refused to sign off on the scheme. Meanwhile, Pesta’s own experience teaching high school students as a volunteer who later wound up at the university where he teaches shows that Common Core standards are having a negative effect on students and learning, he said.

The New American has written extensively on Common Core, including keeping up with the latest developments and two in-depth articles on the standards, the agenda, and the accompanying data-mining programs. To watch a recording of Dr. Pesta’s most recent testimony at the Wisconsin hearing, click here. Dr. Stotsky’s recorded testimony can be accessed here. A detailed presentation on Common Core by FPE can be viewed here. Finally, watch Dr. Pesta’s latest video commentary for TNA about the radical “science,” “history,” and “sexuality” standards below:



Published on Oct 18, 2013
Dr. Duke Pesta, academic director at Freedom Project Education, discusses the dangers of the new Common Core national education standards. He highlights the particular concerns parents should have about the upcoming health, sexuality, science, and history standards that will soon be used in our nation's public schools.

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