COMMON CORE ... Explained as if a child could understand! HOW DID THIS ALL HAPPEN? Picture Common Core was not developed by the states but rather by the COMMON CORE REGIME along with Obamas stimulus $$ and pushed by the duped Republican governors and business groups. The push by a DC-based nonprofit called Achieve, Inc., which is the Education division of Rupert Murdoch‘s News Corp., under the auspices of the National Governors Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) in 2007. Neither NGA nor CCSSO (which are merely trade associations with private membership lists) had a grant of legislative authority from the states to develop national standards. In fact, Common Core was written by the same progressive education reformers who have been trying to impose a national curriculum for decades. This time, they were savvy enough to invoke the “cover”of NGA so they could paint Common Core as a “state-led” effort. To the extent states had any input, it was limited to offering suggestions that may or may not have been accepted by the people in control. Truth: GATES FOUNDATION underwrote( paid for) & promoted the COMMON CORE curriculum scheme RUPERT MURDOCHs News Corp built the database infrastructure inBLOOM evolving out of the above partnership this was created to operate the database. The U.S. Department of Education (USED) did not create the Standards, but it was deeply involved in the effort to gather together the various trade associations and private foundations to do the work that USED wanted done. Once Common Core was created, USED “persuaded” the states to adopt it by tying adoption to the opportunity to obtain Race to the Top (RTTT) funding. No Common Core, no RTTT money. (Since then, USED has also attempted to lure states into the Common Core by dangling No Child Left Behind waivers as a reward for adopting the national Standards and national tests. In both RTTT and NCLB waivers, Florida decided to play the game – piece by piece, dollar by dollar. USED is funding the national tests that are being created by two testing consortia (called SMARTER Balanced and PARCC – Florida is a member of PARCC). Obviously, what’s on the PARCC test will dictate what is taught in Florida classrooms – in other words, it will dictate curriculum. So by funding the tests, USED will eventually control the Florida curriculum – in violation of three federal statutes. What Are the NCLB Waivers? Instead of changing the disastrous direction of federal education policy, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s waiver process allows states to reproduce some of the worst aspects of NCLB’s “test and punish” approach while continuing to ignore real issues, like reducing concentrated poverty or providing equitable funding and high quality pre-K for all schools. Money on this whole “project” has used money enough through taxpayer funds and foundation/corporate funds, they could have implemented one of the top curriculum’s in use today in every state, given all teachers raises and still had money left over. However, with that method they would have lost “control”. The legally dubious waiver process has been quoted as giving the states “flexibility.” But the waivers gave states—and more importantly schools, students, educators, and parents—no flexibility at all in the area they need it most: relief from the plague of standardized testing. When NCLB was passed in 2002, 19 states gave annual tests in reading and math. Today, under federal mandate, all 50 do and the waivers will mean more testing. As with the Administration’s Race to The Top, states applying for waivers had to commit to implementing another generation of standardized tests based on the“common core” standards that states were also forced to adopt. New Jersey, one of the states getting a waiver, is promising to replace NCLB’s absurd adequate yearly progress (AYP) system with “annual measurable objectives.” It’s a shell game only testing companies will win. There will be more tests in more subjects, and the tests will be Used not only to abuse students, but to rate and impose sanctions on teachers and the schools of education they came from. This is another set of wrong answers to the wrong questions. Teachers are also going to be held accountable for the progress of their students and accountable they should be if they had good “tools”. The old saying of “garbage in – garbage out” comes to mind. The waivers will also turn up the pressure on schools serving the highest need populations. States must identify the 5 percent of schools with the lowest test scores and turn them into charters or“turnarounds” or close them down. Another 10 percent with low graduation rates or wide achievement gaps must be targeted for similar intervention. This is not a school improvement strategy, it’s a blank check to experiment on poor kids and create chaos in our most vulnerable communities. The absurdity of closing schools and imposing “disruptive reform” on the poorest communities was underscored the same day the waivers were announced when a study was released showing that “the gap in standardized test scores between affluent and low-income students had grown by about 40 percent since the 1960s, and is now double the testing gap between blacks and whites.” The continued punishing of schools for the inequality that exists all around them is not reform; it’s a cynical political exercise. Since 1964, the Federal government’s intervention, illegally, into the business of education has only gotten worse as with everything they touch. NCLB is such a bad law it’s not hard to see why 30 more states are considering filing waiver applications this month. But teachers and parents would do better if their states took a pass on the hollow promise of NCLB waivers and lobbied for a different piece of paper: one to remove the Federal Government and Corporate business out of the Education of our children. In Florida, NCLB was implemented while Jeb Bush was governor and he wholeheartedly approved of it and the testing with FCAT “teach to the test”. Since leaving office, Bush has continued to push for Charter schools because the traditional public schools are “all failing” (they are not in fact the Charter schools in Florida are failing at a rate of 11% more than traditional schools. Now the Federal government and the Bush Foundation along with the Gates, Eli Broad, Wal-Mart and other Foundations are pushing what they said was bad for the states in NCLB, giving them standardized, controlled education and forcing the students into a Charter school from a failing school. It sounds more like a cattle business moving the herd from one field to another. ENGLISH LANGUAGE ARTS Picture What’s Wrong with the English Language Arts (ELA) standards? According to Dr. Stotsky, an expert on ELA standards, Common Core consists of “empty skill sets . . . [that] weaken the basis of literary and cultural knowledge needed for authentic college coursework.” This means they state what students should be able to do– such as identify the main idea in a piece of writing – but not what they should know – for example, specific works of great writers. This means that almost anything could qualify for “English language arts” study – even anti-capitalist tracts like Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, or photo essays from a newspaper. But will Common Core require students to read more complex texts, as claimed? Dr. Stotsky cites a report that assesses the grade levels of some of the books in Common Core’s recommended reading list. According to this study, some of the novels for grades 9/10 in Common Core average about a grade 5 reading level; for grades 11/12, about a Grade 8 reading level. But the most serious problem with Common Core’s ELA standards isn’t the reading levels of the literature – it’s the de-emphasis on literature, period. Common Core emphasizes “informational texts” to the detriment of creative literature. This means the Standards dictate that students spend most of their time – 70% — reading nonfictionsuch as technical manuals and court decisions. Although the Standards commentary claims that this 70% covers all subject areas, not just English, the drafters clearly recommend that at least 50% of the reading material within the English class should be nonfiction informational text, not classic literature. And because English teachers will be held accountable for how students perform on “literacy” questions on informational passages, they will be under tremendous pressure to reduce the time they spend on classic literature – which they were all trained to teach – and spend more time on informational passages from other disciplines – which none of them have been trained to teach. Common Core claims to be “evidence-based.” So what’s the evidence that children will become better readers if they read informational texts rather than good literature? It’s nonexistent. In fact, the evidence is to the contrary. For years, Massachusetts had a literature-rich set of standardsthat propelled its students to the top spot in national reading scores. This experience suggests that the way to make students more literate is to teach them to love reading – and you do that with literature, not informational texts. Some college English professors are aghast at the philosophy of the Common Core ELA standards – that English students should be drilled to ferret out facts rather than immersed in great works of literature that make them better citizens, better leaders, better people. But this is all part of the larger philosophy of which Common Core is only one segment: the idea that children should be trained to be workers – cogs in a managed economic machine – rather than educated as thinking, feeling human beings who might upset the plans of their betters. Viewed in this light, the de-emphasis on literature makes sense. But if we see education as something more than than this – as our Founding Fathers saw it, for example — we should be alarmed at this direction. Dr. Anthony Esolen of Providence College put it well: “What has happened to the people’s love of liberty? Where has it gone? I suggest that it has gone the way of our belief in the dignity of the human person, who is never to be reduced to a mere counter or cell or drab functionary in an economy . . . . There is a connection to be drawn between disdain for liberty and disdain for the things that are peculiarly human – for example, loyalty to our parents and forebears, or our often faraway longing for what is beautiful and virtuous, or an abiding sense of the sacred, or our common worship of God.” Common Core’s disdain for classical literature, he says, “is an affront to human dignity.” OBAMAS WAR ON ACADEMIC STANDARDS (PART 1) Picture By Michelle Malkin • January 23, 2013 09:43 AM This year, I’ll be using my syndicated column and blog space to expose how progressive “reformers” — mal-formers — are corrupting our schools. One of my New Year’s resolutions is to provide you in-depth coverage of this vital issue that too often gets shunted off the daily political/partisan agenda. While the GOP tries to solve its ills with better software and communications consultants, the conservative movement — and America — face much larger problems. It doesn’t start with the “low-information voter.” It starts with the no-knowledge student. This is the first in an ongoing series on “Common Core,” the stealthy federal takeover of school curriculum and standards across the country. As longtime readers know, my own experience with this ongoing sabotage of academic excellence dates back to my early reporting on the Clinton-era “Goals 2000″ and “outcome-based” education and extends to my recent parental experience with “Everyday Math”. The good news is that grass-roots education and parental groups, brave teachers, and professors are fighting back. See the resource list/links at the bottom of this column and stay tuned for much more. *** Rotten to the Core: Obama’s War on Academic Standards (Part 1) by Michelle Malkin Creators Syndicate America’s downfall doesn’t begin with the “low-information voter.” It starts with the no-knowledge student. For decades, collectivist agitators in our schools have chipped away at academic excellence in the name of fairness, diversity and social justice. “Progressive” reformers denounced Western civilization requirements, the Founding Fathers and the Great Books as racist. They attacked traditional grammar classes as irrelevant in modern life. They deemed ability grouping of students (tracking) bad for self-esteem. They replaced time-tested rote techniques and standard algorithms with fuzzy math, inventive spelling and multicultural claptrap. Under President Obama, these top-down mal-formers — empowered by Washington education bureaucrats and backed by misguided liberal philanthropists led by billionaire Bill Gates — are now presiding over a radical makeover of your children’s school curriculum. It’s being done in the name of federal “Common Core” standards that do anything but raise achievement standards. Common Core was enabled by Obama’s federal stimulus law and his Department of Education’s “Race to the Top” gimmickry. The administration bribed cash-starved states into adopting unseen instructional standards as a condition of winning billions of dollars in grants. Even states that lost their bids for Race to the Top money were required to commit to a dumbed-down and amorphous curricular “alignment.” In practice, Common Core’s dubious “college- and career”-ready standards undermine local control of education, usurp state autonomy over curricular materials, and foist untested, mediocre and incoherent pedagogical theories on America’s schoolchildren. Over the next several weeks and months, I’ll use this column space to expose who’s behind this disastrous scheme in D.C. backrooms. I’ll tell you who’s fighting it in grassroots tea party and parental revolts across the country from Massachusetts to Indiana, Texas, Georgia and Utah. And most importantly, I’ll explain how this unprecedented federal meddling is corrupting our children’s classrooms and textbooks. There’s no better illustration of Common Core’s duplicitous talk of higher standards than to start with its math “reforms.” While Common Core promoters assert their standards are “internationally benchmarked,” independent members of the expert panel in charge of validating the standards refute the claim. Panel member Dr. Sandra Stotsky of the University of Arkansas reported, “No material was ever provided to the Validation Committee or to the public on the specific college readiness expectations of other leading nations in mathematics” or other subjects. Professor Jonathan Goodman of New York University found that the Common Core math standards imposed “significantly lower expectations with respect to algebra and geometry than the published standards of other countries.” Under Common Core, as the American Principles Project and Pioneer Institute point out, algebra I instruction is pushed to 9th grade, instead of 8th grade, as commonly taught. Division is postponed from 5th to 6th grade. Prime factorization, common denominators, conversions of fractions and decimals, and algebraic manipulation are de-emphasized or eschewed. Traditional Euclidean geometry is replaced with an experimental approach that had not been previously pilot-tested in the U.S. Ze’ev Wurman, a prominent software architect, electrical engineer and longtime math advisory expert in California and Washington, D.C., points out that Common Core delays proficiency with addition and subtraction until 4th grade and proficiency with basic multiplication until 5th grade, and skimps on logarithms, mathematical induction, parametric equations and trigonometry at the high school level. I cannot sum up the stakes any more clearly than Wurman did in his critique of this mess and the vested interests behind it: “I believe the Common Core marks the cessation of educational standards improvement in the United States. No state has any reason left to aspire for first-rate standards, as all states will be judged by the same mediocre national benchmark enforced by the federal government. Moreover, there are organizations that have reasons to work for lower and less-demanding standards, specifically teachers unions and professional teacher organizations. While they may not admit it, they have a vested interest in lowering the accountability bar for their members. …This will be done in the name of ‘critical thinking’ and ’21st-century’ skills, and in faraway Washington, D.C., well beyond the reach of parents and most states and employers.” This is all in keeping with my own experience as a parent of elementary- and middle-school age kids who were exposed to “Everyday Math” nonsense. This and other fads abandon “drill and kill” memorization techniques for fuzzy “critical thinking” methods that put the cart of “why” in front of the horse of “how.” In other words: Instead of doing the grunt work of hammering times tables and basic functions into kids’ heads first, the faddists have turned to wacky, wordy non-math alternatives to encourage “conceptual” understanding — without any mastery of the fundamentals of math. Common Core is rotten to the core. The corruption of math education is just the beginning. Readin’, Writin’ and Deconstructionism Picture By Michelle Malkin • January 25, 2013 11:10 AM Common Core learning: The Gettysburg Address “word cloud” Here’s the next installment of my Rotten to the Core series. I’ll continue to post resource/background/activist links at the end of every post. See also the links below to my previous critiques of GOP-led national standards efforts and related posts on dumbed-down curriculum/Everyday Math. There are many, many amazing grass-roots efforts in the states that have been gaining ground over the past three years and I hope to spotlight as many of them as possible. They’ve been in this fight a long time and their work is indispensable. It’s important to note that the Common Core cheerleaders’ claim that their agenda came from the bottom up is false. Flat-out false. I’ll also be printing e-mails, feedback, critiques, and responses. Stay tuned, spread the word, get informed, and get active. *** Rotten to the Core (Part 2): Readin’, Writin’ and Deconstructionism by Michelle Malkin Creators Syndicate Copyright 2013 (This is the second part of an ongoing series on federal “Common Core” education standards and the corruption of academic excellence.) The Washington, D.C., board of education earned widespread mockery this week when it proposed allowing high school students — in the nation’s own capital — to skip a basic U.S. government course to graduate. But this is fiddlesticks compared to what the federal government is doing to eliminate American children’s core knowledge base in English, language arts and history. Thanks to the “Common Core” regime, funded with President Obama’s stimulus dollars and bolstered by duped Republican governors and business groups, deconstructionism is back in style. Traditional literature is under fire. Moral relativism is increasingly the norm. “Standards” is Orwell-speak for subjectivity and lowest common denominator pedagogy. Take the Common Core literacy “standards.” Please. As literature professors, writers, humanities scholars, secondary educators and parents have warned over the past three years, the new achievement goals actually set American students back by de-emphasizing great literary works for “informational texts.” Challenging students to digest and dissect difficult poems and novels is becoming passe. Utilitarianism uber alles. The Common Core English/language arts criteria call for students to spend only half of their class time studying literature, and only 30 percent of their class time by their junior and senior years in high school. Under Common Core, classics such as “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” are of no more academic value than the pages of the Federal Register or the Federal Reserve archives — or a pro-Obamacare opinion essay in The New Yorker. Audio and video transcripts, along with “alternative literacies” that are more “relevant” to today’s students (pop song lyrics, for example), are on par with Shakespeare. English professor Mary Grabar describes Common Core training exercises that tell teachers “to read Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address without emotion and without providing any historical context. Common Core reduces all ‘texts’ to one level: the Gettysburg Address to the EPA’s Recommended Levels of Insulation.” Indeed, in my own research, I found one Common Core “exemplar” on teaching the Gettysburg Address that instructs educators to “refrain from giving background context or substantial instructional guidance at the outset.” Another exercise devised by Common Core promoters features the Gettysburg Address as a word cloud. Yes, a word cloud. Teachers use the jumble of letters, devoid of historical context and truths, to help students chart, decode and “deconstruct” Lincoln’s speech. Deconstructionism, of course, is the faddish leftwing school of thought popularized by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in the 1970s. Writer Robert Locke described the nihilistic movement best: “It is based on the proposition that the apparently real world is in fact a vast social construct and that the way to knowledge lies in taking apart in one’s mind this thing society has built. Taken to its logical conclusion, it supposes that there is at the end of the day no actual reality, just a series of appearances stitched together by social constructs into what we all agree to call reality.” Literature and history are all about competing ideological narratives, in other words. One story or “text” is no better than another. Common Core’s literature-lite literacy standards are aimed not at increasing “college readiness” or raising academic expectations. Just the opposite. They help pave the way for more creeping political indoctrination under the guise of increasing access to “information.” As University of Arkansas professor Sandra Stotsky, an unrelenting whistleblower who witnessed the Common Core sausage-making process firsthand, concluded: “An English curriculum overloaded with advocacy journalism or with ‘informational’ articles chosen for their topical and/or political nature should raise serious concerns among parents, school leaders, and policymakers. Common Core’s standards not only present a serious threat to state and local education authority, but also put academic quality at risk. Pushing fatally flawed education standards into America’s schools is not the way to improve education for America’s students.” Bipartisan Common Core defenders claim their standards are merely “recommendations.” But the standards, “rubrics” and “exemplars” are tied to tests and textbooks. The textbooks and tests are tied to money and power. Federally funded and federally championed nationalized standards lead inexorably to de facto mandates. Any way you slice it, dice it or word-cloud it, Common Core is a mandate for mediocrity. LESSONS FROM TEXAS & A GROWING GRASS ROOTS REVOLT (PART 3) Picture By: Michelle Malkin 3/01/2013 08:27 AM While many Americans worry about government drones in the sky spying on our private lives, Washington meddlers are already on the ground and in our schools gathering intimate data on children and families. Say goodbye to your children’s privacy. Say hello to an unprecedented nationwide student-tracking system, whose data will apparently be sold by government officials to the highest bidders. It’s yet another encroachment of centralized education bureaucrats on local control and parental rights under the banner of “Common Core.” As the American Principles Project, a conservative education think tank, reported last year, Common Core’s technological project is “merely one part of a much broader plan by the federal government to track individuals from birth through their participation in the workforce.” The 2009 porkulus package included a “State Fiscal Stabilization Fund” to bribe states into constructing “longitudinal data systems (LDS) to collect data on public-school students.” These systems will aggregate massive amounts of personal data — health-care histories, income information, religious affiliations, voting status, and even blood types and homework-completion rates. The data will be available to a wide variety of public agencies. And despite federal student-privacy protections guaranteed by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, the Obama administration is paving the way for private entities to buy their way into the data boondoggle. Even more alarming, the U.S. Department of Education is encouraging a radical push from aggregate-level data-gathering to invasive individual-student-level data collection. At the South by Southwest education conference in Austin, Texas, this week, education-technology gurus were salivating at the prospects of information plunder. “This is going to be a huge win for us,” Jeffrey Olen, a product manager at education software company CompassLearning, told Reuters. Cha-ching-ching-ching. The company is already aggressively marketing curricular material “aligned” to fuzzy, dumbed-down Common Core math and reading guidelines (which more than a dozen states are now revolting against). Along with two dozen other tech firms, CompassLearning sees even greater financial opportunities to mine Common Core student-tracking systems. The centralized database is a strange-bedfellows alliance between the liberal Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (which largely underwrote and promoted the Common Core curricular scheme) and a division of conservative Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. (which built the database infrastructure). Another nonprofit startup, “inBloom, Inc.,” has evolved out of that partnership to operate the database. The Gates Foundation and other partners provided $100 million in seed money. Reuters reports that inBloom, Inc. will “likely start to charge fees in 2015” to states and school districts participating in the system. “So far, seven states — Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, North Carolina and Massachusetts — have committed to enter data from select school districts. Louisiana and New York will be entering nearly all student records statewide.” The National Education Data Model, available online, lists hundreds of data points considered indispensable to the nationalized student tracking racket. These include: “Bus Stop Arrival Time” and “Bus Stop Description” “Dwelling arrangement” “Diseases, Illnesses and Other Health Conditions” “Religious Affiliation” “Telephone Number Type” and “Telephone Status” Home-schoolers and religious families that reject traditional government education would be tracked. Original NEDM data points included hair color, eye color, weight, blood types, and even dental status. How exactly does amassing and selling such personal data improve educational outcomes? It doesn’t. This, at its core, is the central fraud of Washington’s top-down nationalized curricular scheme. The Bill Gates-endorsed Common Core “standards” are a phony pretext for big-government expansion. The dazzling allure of “21st-century technology” masks the privacy-undermining agenda of nosy bureaucratic drones allergic to transparency, accountability, and parental autonomy. Individual student privacy is sacrificed at the collective “For the Children” altar. Fed ed is not about excellence or academic achievement. It’s about control, control, and more control THE FEDS INVASIVE STUDENT TRACKING DATABASE (PART 4) Picture by Michelle Malkin 03/08/2013 Texas is a right-minded red state, where patriotism is still a virtue and political correctness is out of vogue. So why on earth are Lone Star State students being instructed to dress in Islamic garb, call the 9/11 jihadists “freedom fighters,” and treat the Boston Tea Party participants as “terrorists”? Here’s the dirty little secret: Despite the best efforts of vigilant parents, teachers, and administrators committed to academic excellence, progressive activists reign supreme in our nation’s public schools. That’s because curriculum is king. The liberal monopoly on the modern textbook market remains unchallenged after half a century. He who controls the textbooks, teaching guides, and tests controls the academic agenda. That is how the propagandistic outfitting of students in Islamic garb came to pass in the unlikely setting of the conservative Lumberton, Texas, school district. As Fox News reporter Todd Starnes noted this week, a 32-year veteran teacher at the high school led a world-geography lesson on Islam in which hijab-wrapped students were forbidden to use the words “suicide bomber” and “terrorist” to describe Muslim mass murderers, in favor of the term “freedom fighter.” Madelyn LeBlanc, one of the students in the class, “told Fox News that it was clear her teacher was very uncomfortable lecturing the students. ‘I do have a lot of sympathy for her. . . . At the very beginning, she said she didn’t want to teach it, but it was in the curriculum.’” But the headline-grabbing injection of moral equivalence into social studies and American history is just the tip of the education iceberg. Top-down federalized “Common Core” standards are now sweeping the country. It’s important to remember that while teachers-union control freaks are on board with the Common Core regime, untold numbers of rank-and-file teachers are just as angered and frustrated as parents about the Big Ed power grab. The program was concocted not at the grassroots level, but by a bipartisan cabal of nonprofits (led by lobbyists for the liberal Bill Gates Foundation), and statist business groups and hoodwinked Republican governors signed off on it. As I’ve reported previously, this scheme, enabled by the Obama administration’s “Race to the Top” funding mechanism, usurps local autonomy in matters of lesson content and pedagogical methods. One teacher described a thought-control training seminar in her school district titled “Making the Common Core Come Alive.” A worksheet labeled “common core mind shifts” included the following rhetorical muck: • “The goal of curriculum should not be the coverage of content, but rather the discovery of content. . . . If done well, Common Core will elevate our teaching to new heights, and emphasize the construction of meaning, while deepening our understanding of our students.” • “In our classrooms, it is the students’ voices, not the teachers’, that are heard.” Blah, blah, blah. In practice, Common Core evades transparency by peddling shoddy curricular material authored by anonymous committees. It promotes faddish experiments masquerading as “world-class” math and reading instruction. Instead of raising expectations, Common Core is a Trojan horse for lowering them. California, for example, is now citing Common Core as a rationale for abandoning algebra classes for eighth-graders. Common Core’s “constructivist” approach to reading is now the rationale for abandoning classic literature for “informational texts.” Claims that Common Core bubbled up from the states are bass-ackward. A shady nonprofit group called “Achieve Inc.,” stocked with federal-standards advocates who have been around since the Clinton years, designed the materials. They were rubber-stamped by the National Governors’ Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, and subsidized by the Gates Foundation. In states like Texas, which rejected Common Core, similar secretive alliances prevail. The Texas Education Service Center Curriculum Collaborative, a nonprofit group led by government officials, designed the “CSCOPE” curriculum now used in 80 percent of the state’s schools. The state Board of Education, local schools, and parents were denied access to the online CSCOPE curriculum database — which was exempted from disclosure rules. In fact, dissemination of the lessons was considered a crime until earlier this month. Only after parents and teachers across the state blew the whistle on radical CSCOPE lesson plans (including designing a new flag for a socialist lesson) did the state take steps to rein in the CSCOPE zealots. Grassroots activists in Indiana, Alabama, Utah, and nearly a dozen other states are now educating themselves and their state legislatures about the centralized-education racket, whether it’s under the guise of Common Core or any other name. Last week, in response to a passionate parent-driven protest, the Indiana state Senate passed legislation to halt the implementation of Common Core. Anti–Common Core bills are moving through the Alabama state legislature, where lawmakers are especially concerned about how Common Core’s intrusive data-gathering would violate student privacy. As Texas goes, so goes the nation. The fight against the federalization of academic standards is a national education Alamo. — Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies. © 2013 Creators
Posted on: Fri, 12 Sep 2014 17:42:03 +0000
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