CONCERNED CITIZENS OF SOUTHERN NEW JERSEY – AKA “THE COMMON CORE FOUR”
In the photo: Jan Lenox, Lynne Shirk, Deb Yoa and Michelle Mellon, four unstoppable grandmothers of New Jersey who spearhead a group called Concerned Citizens of Southern New Jersey
Jan Lenox wrote a letter that was published this week at the Cape May County Herald in New Jersey.
To the Editor:
Concerned Citizens of South N.J. made the two hour+ trip to Trenton April 28 to deliver our petitions on Common Core/PARCC to the governor.
We attended the Senate budget hearing on education with Commissioner David Hespe’s testimony. It was just one more dog and pony show in a long list of same old, same old educratical nonsense. The only glimmer of light was brought from Senator Jeff Van Drew when he asked a few pointed questions about the never-voted-on legislation, presented last year.
After three long hours of waiting for a reason to be there, we decided to leave the chamber and continue on to what we came to Trenton to do. We were met by a state police officer when we entered the governor’s ante-office; we were told we couldn’t enter. We explained that we wanted to present our petition to Governor Christie. We then were sent to the security office, checked in and waited for the governor’s aide-de-camp to greet us there. Kia, the aide, a very young woman and her even younger assistant came through the door and stood before us.
“What do you want,” she asked without introducing herself. I asked, “Who are you?” She answered, “I am the governor’s aide and this is my assistant.”
I introduced our group by name and stated that we came to deliver our petition. I stated to her that we had previously sent formal requests to the governor’s scheduler and followed with emails, and were denied a meeting. I continued to explain that we had carried these signatures with us for over two years and attached to the package was a personal letter signed by our group.
Her response was less than polite or professional. To paraphrase her response: “I cannot guarantee he will get these. He gets thousands of letters. I am not his scheduler.”
Then she went on to say that the governor’s schedule was full until June 30. She told us to attend his upcoming town hall meetings that were being planned throughout the state. We heard that if you attend six town halls, you can request a meeting with the governor. This is ludicrous at best. She was very curt and annoyed that we came to bother her. Kia offered no information to help us.
She took our package and said she would deliver it to his office without any other information or response. According to Kia, Governor Christie was very well aware of people’s angst over the Common Core and PARCC.
Well then, why won’t he meet with concerned citizens and alleviate our angst?
At the very least, we should have been met with a smile and a courteous attitude.
It was a very long day. We left the State House and started our journey home. Thank God, we have copies and thank Him for keeping our tempers in check. After all, we had two state troopers right behind us.
Did I mention that we’re all grandmothers?
The petition letter, which was stapled to many pages of signatures from the citizens of New Jersey:
Dear Governor Christie,
We are here today on behalf of the citizens of the state of New Jersey. On March 23, 2013 a letter was sent to you regarding our urgent request for information and support regarding the Common Core State Standards Initiative. Forty letters were sent to representatives of our state, Commissioner Cerf, county superintendents and local school principals. Our requests were never answered.
For over 25 months, Concerned Citizens of Southern New Jersey has partnered with many other groups north, south, east and west, and have shared our message. Parents, grandparents, guardians, as well as teachers and many legislators believe as we do, that Common Core is an unjust, unnecessary and unwanted commodity. New Jersey had good standards. We want them back!
Dr. Sandra Stotsky, Professor Emerita of the University of Arkansas, and one of only two experts on the original CCSS validation committee, said that the standards were inferior and refused to sign off on them. She has since offered to write new standards, at no cost to the US DOE, however, that most generous offer was flatly negated.
Your office has twice denied CCSNJ a scheduled visit with you to explain our position; however, our children’s educational future hangs in the balance. So, we are here to present you with our petitions to end this agenda now. We hope you will stand with the voters, parents and most importantly the children of our great state and repeal Common Core.
God bless you and may He guide your course going forward.
Respectfully submitted,
Janice Lenox__________________________ Carolyn B. Shirk___________________________
It is remarkable that this scenario is replaying itself in state after state across this great nation. Citizens who stand up and speak up for their rights and their children’s best interests in education and are being ignored, maligned, or threatened by the new ruling elite. The new education elite is comprised of the members of the private trade organizations with the presumptuous sounding names like “National Governors’ Association,” or the equally unelected and equally presumptuous State Superintendents’ Club, the “Council of Chief State School Officers,” hand in hand with the federal Department of Education, the corporations such as the British-owned education sales conglomerate Pearson Inc., and the philanthropists whose heavy handed generosity sets policy that governs millions, notably the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Call me crazy but I like liberty and self-government; I like the style of Americanism that the founders envisioned and set into the Declaration and the Constitution. This new education-by-elite ain’t that.
Last week bipartisan grassroots Americans saw a miracle.
That wolf in sheep’s clothing, the (supposed) shoo-in bill called federal HR5 or The Student Success Act, which was to reauthorize No Child Left Behind/ESEA, wasthrown aside by Congress instead of becoming law. Thanks to a bipartisan effort by grassroots citizens and vigilant Congressmen who studied the language inside the bill’s 600+ pages –not just buying Speaker Boehner’s gilded talking points— the dangers of HR5 surfaced into Congressional consciousness.
A whirlwind of amendment-writing began on both sides of the aisle. By the time Congress gave up on trying to pass HR5 last week, there were so many amendments from both Democratic and Republican members of Congress that everybody seemed to dislike the bill and Obama was threatening to veto.
That was a very unexpected turn of events. –But proper! Emmett McGroarty of American Principles in Action summarized the problems of NCLB and HR5: “HR5 demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of the Constitution and our constitutional structure. Although it relieves the states from some NCLB burdens, it then adds others and overall sets the stage for an expanded federal footprint in our lives.”
Additionally, a powerful open letter from a bipartisan group ofover 2,000 educational researchers (See letter here) last month informed Congress that “testing should not be driving reform.”
The 2000 educational researchers who signed last month’s letter saw as harmful the federal aim “to use students’ test scores as a lever to drive educational improvement.” They explained: “This use of testing is ill-advised because… it has demonstrably failed to achieve its intended goal and has potent negative, unintended consequences.” Under No Child Left Behind/ESEA, they said, the federal government had trusted “an unproven but ambitious belief that if we test children and hold educators responsible for improving test scores we would have almost everyone scoring as “proficient” by 2014.” The researchers said: “there is no evidence that any test score increases represent the broader learning increases… While testing advocates proclaim that testing drives student learning, they resist evidence-based explanations for why, after two decades of test-driven accountability, these reforms have yielded such unimpressive results.”
For many, the bottom line problem with both ESEA and HR5 was the ongoing, evidence-less promotion of student high-stakes testing as the solution for education problems. For others, the bottom line problem (in HR5) was language implying conditionality of parental rights, possible waiving of states’ rights, and federal/state intrusion into private schools, particularly into private schools’ free exercise of religious freedom.
With so many heavy, bipartisan issues rolled into ESEA, we can expect that the upcoming bipartisan version of the bill will be plagued with the same struggles we saw in last week’s HR5. These must be identified and fought:
#1 Clarity problems: deliberately lengthy language that scatters definitions across hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages and convoluted language that confuses most readers;
#2 A continued push for testing and data mining that pushes away from local (school or district) accountability toward centralized power; multi-state alignment (de facto national) high stakes testing and data collection that enriches corporations partnered with or funded by Bill Gates/Microsoft and Pearson.
#3 A push for centralization of power –with the elites comprised of corporate and governmental partnerships to exclude voters, teachers, parents and duly elected representatives;
#4 No privacy protections beyond the lame and wilted FERPA for our children; instead, increased data collecting powers to corporate-governmental partnerships;
#5 A continued push for more unelected boards to have increased control of greater numbers of schools via charter school expansions;
#6 A continued push for federal-corporate intrusion into private schools;
#7 A continued bartering for parental and states’ rights in trade for federal money;
#8 An assumption of federal-corporate “research” authority –devoid of parental consent and devoid of evidence-based, peer-reviewed validity;
#9 Expansion of centralized authority over specified groups, such as “migratory students” or “Alaskan Natives”; in sum:
#10 A continued disregard for Constitutional rights.
Please watch not only the ESEA/NCLB reauthorization, but also the S.227 SETRA bill. They go hand in hand.
Federal SETRA hurts student data privacy, allows emotional testing in increased student data mining, and reassigns grant-making (funding) control to REL regions, not states. Read SETRA bill text here.
It appeared to me that HR5 got away with its marketing (saying it was restoring local control) because it transmitted federally-desired, test-driven reforms and other expansions to state authority and to state enforcement, perhaps to appease local control activists. But this was just passing the abuse baton. I imagine the corporate-regional power grabbers singing the “Na-nee-na-nee-boo-boo” song: “You don’t get the steering wheel. Constitution Constasmooshen. Who’s got your taxes?”
(Important note: in the coming SETRA bill, fund-approving power is siphoned past the states to REL regional authorities, making Constitutional state-rights less and less relevant.)
These power-reassignments are not appealing to those who want true local control.
Pray that our Congressmen find time, energy and wisdom to see through it all and that they will have the courage to protect children’s rights, teacher’s rights, voters’ rights, and parent’s rights.
Hour one features History Professor Terrence Moore of Hillsdale College (opposed to Common Core) versus former school board member Laura Boggs (pro Common Core).
Highlights from hour one:
At minute 10:45 Laura Moore gives a 7-minute pro-Common Core intro. She explains why she thinks that it is good to have national education standards, comparing educational standards to car wheels. She speaks about the “states coming together” as if they did so.
She says that she is opposed to the federal government having much say in education, which really confuses me. I don’t comprehend how she can sit on that fence, but she apparently believes that Colorado’s Common Core was created largely by Colorado teachers, rather than the CCSSO and NGA. This, even though the CCSSO/NGA declares, right on the copyright page, that it is the sole developer of the standards, and even though the CCSSO declares, on its official website, that it is partnered with the federal Department of Education.
Anyway.
At minute 17:50 Dr. Terrence Moore gives a 7-minute anti-Common Core intro.
He talks about the reduction of literary texts, and discusses the lexile framework of the Common Core creators that makes huge errors, such as placing Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” on a 3rd grade reading level; he discusses the Appendix B recommendations of Common Core that crowds out classics and religious writers and Ben Franklin, with the Common Core’s preference for modern authors and informational text.
Here’s a great moment: at minute 36:00 the question is asked: “Are Common Core standards actually field tested?”
Laura Boggs says that they are “absolutely tested.” (She does not say where or how or by whom they were supposedly tested.)
Dr. Terrence Moore answers the same question: he says that the Common Core standards were absolutely not field tested.
At minute 42:00 Dr. Terrence Moore explains why we should reject Common Core outright. He also mentions learning more about this in his book, “Storykillers.”
He asks when the last time was, that we heard Secretary Arne Duncan or a school board member quote Shakespeare. He makes the point that one of the biggest problems we have in education is that “the people who are in charge do not love education.”
LAURA BOGGS (FORMER SCHOOL BOARD MEMBER)
TEACHER ANTHONY CODY
Hour two features California teacher Anthony Cody (opposed to Common Core) versus Fordham Institute member Michael Brickman (pro Common Core).
Hour two also includes Common Core validation committee member Dr. Sandra Stotsky and The American Principles Project’s Jane Robbins.
This interview with Indiana Mother Heather Crossin is not to be missed. Speaking to the Civitas Institute, she tells the story of how she got involved with the fight against Common Core:
Her third grade daughter came home from her Catholic parochial school with Common Core math worksheets. The worksheets had a “shockingly small amount” of practice, and an “inordinate amount of time spent explaining in writing how students got to answers” which had to be written by students in very scripted ways. Heather started to ask questions.
She soon found herself at a school meeting to discuss the Common Core styled math, and heard a sales pitch from a Pearson Education sales representative. She and the parents in the room didn’t like the pitch nor the new math. Then the principal informed them that there was no choice. That was Heather’s moment of illumination.
“Suddenly I realized the control over what was being taught in my child’s third grade classroom was now not at my school level. In fact, it was not even at the state level. It had been removed and all control now resided outside the state of Indiana, with private trade associations that owned the copyright to these standards. So no one in my school building, or even in my state, had the ability to change, edit or delete a set of standards that I found right out of the gate to be problematic…
“…We could not believe that a shift of this magnitude had occurred in our state and no one was aware of it. We felt an overwhelming desire to at least let the people know what had happened. We felt strongly that if people knew that this type of a shift in power and control had occurred, they would be outraged as we were, and I think we found that they were.”
In this interview, Heather also explains why parents can and must get involved:
“The stakes are so high. This is not an issue that can be ignored. It really affects not just our children’s future but really our country’s future.”
She touches on the fact that the Common Core testing system (aligned now with college entrance exams) places even home schooled students and private school students at a serious disadvantage. She also relates the method by which she and other parents pushed for, and succeeded in getting, the first “pause” legislation to stop Common Core for Indiana, adding:
“The most powerful weapon that we’ve had… is that the truth and the facts are overwhelmingly on the side of the Common Core opponents. That is a very powerful weapon.”
This week, a group of Florida parents, supported by parents and educators nationwide, released an executive order, demanding an end to Common Core and the parentally unauthorized student data mining that’s taking place in every state.
As parents, we claim the privilege of directing our childrens’ educations, free from SLDS (state longitudinal database tracking systems), free from Common Core-aligned testing, standards, or “model” curriculum; free from private trade group EIMAC/CCSSO data collection, free from federal micromanagement, free from federal “accountability”; free from the both student and teacher data mining and tracking that is offensive to individual liberty and to Constitutional, local control.
As parents and teachers, we claim the privilege outlined in the Declaration of Independence that government is by consent of the governed. We, the governed, have not been asked nor have we approved these unvetted standards and systems. Therefore, any governance of children or school staff under the Common Core agenda is simply invalid.
Why: The promises of the promoters of the Common Core Standards do not add up. The evidence is overwhelming, and increases daily, that the Common Core agenda damages where it claims to serve; yet those who push back against the Common Core agenda are disrespected by school boards and in hearings around the nation. This is outrageous. We are the children’s parents; children are not the government’s human capital” despite what the Department of Education repeatedly claims.
Along with the executive order, parents have issued a longer, referenced document that explains the reasoning behind the executive order. This document is entitled “Welcome to the Common Core Fuzzy Math: Common Core Equals Conditions Plus Coercion Plus Conflict of Interest.”
Please pass this message along.
Here is a partial list of all the parent-educator groups working to fight the federal-and-corporate partnered machine of Common Core.
Yay! Click on the link for the text/t.v. clip, showing students, teachers and parents who rallied at the Utah State Office of Education today to protest Common Core.
Have you called your favorite Indiana legislator yet today?
317- 232-9600. 317-232-4567. 317-232-9677
Yes, I know we may not be from Indiana. But what happens elsewhere, affects our local freedom.
See what one Ohio resident wrote:
“I am from Ohio. My kids are grown, but I am active in opposing Common Core. God bless you in your fight to stall Common Core in Indiana.
This morning, I sent an e-mail to Indiana Speaker, Brian Bosma. The text was as follows:
“SB1427 must be called down for a vote!
The parents and residents in Indiana are fighting for time and the Indiana House of Representatives must allow this important bill to come to a full vote! You must hear the will of the people and parents of Indiana and you must call SB1427 for a vote!
SB1427 addresses Common Core Curriculum! The education of the children is too important to pass through any state without intelligent discussion and the involvement of the parents and residents.
I do not live in Indiana, but as a resident of Ohio, I am watching what happens in states across America. Common Core is just becoming known and there is growing and fierce opposition nation wide! I believe there is great cause for concern. Common Core has, quite frankly, been foisted upon the entire nation in secret. Please allow Indiana to be a stand-out state who upholds representative government!
Please bring SB1427 to the floor for a vote in the great state of Indiana!
God bless, Kathy L Johnson Ohio resident”
Call the Indiana Governor at (317)232-4567. Call the Indiana House 317-232-9600 . (Ask to speak to whoever you want, or to Speaker Brian Bosma.) Another number for Bosma: 317-232-9677
COMMON CORE 