The article makes “truth” claims that include the notion that Common Core is “more rigorous,” (where’s the proof?) and that the standards allow policymaking to happen locally. How can that be? The standards are written behind closed doors in D.C. The standards are copyrighted and are unamendable by locals. There is a 15% cap on adding to them, written into the ESEA Flexibility Waiver Request. And there is no amendment process; thus, no local control.
For anyone who has been living under an education reform rock, know this: Gates is the single biggest promoter and funder of Common Core, bar none.) So, Fordham’s and Manhattan Institute’s writers should not be expected to be objective about Common Core.
The National Review writes that it is a “right-of-center” organization, as if that claim is a “trust-me” pass. This is meaningless in Common Core land because, as Emmett McGroarty of the American Principles Project, has said, “Opposition to Common Core cuts across the left-right spectrum. It gets back to who should control our children’s education — people in Indiana or people in Washington?”
But we should clarify that oodles of Democrats and Republicans sell or benefit from Common Core implementation. That is the top reason for the gold rush anxiety to promote the national standards. A secondary reason is lemminghood (misplaced and unproven trust).
Republican Jeb Bush is behind the Foundation for Excellence in Education, a nongovernmental group which pushes Common Core and is, of course, funded by Gates. Republican Rupert Murdoch owns not only Fox News, but also the common core implementation company Wireless Generation that’s creating common core testing technology. Democrat Bob Corcoran, President of GE Foundation (author of cap and trade and carbon footprint taxes to profit GE on green tech) and 49% owner of NBC also bribed the PTA to promote Common Core, and gave an additional $18 million to the states to push common core implementation. Corcoran was seen recently hobnobbing with Utah’s Republican Lt. Governor Greg Bell, business leaders in the Chamber of Commerce, and has testified in the education committee that the opponents of Common Core in Utah “are liars”. Meanwhile, Republican Todd Huston of Indiana got his largest campaign donation from David Coleman, common core ELA architect; then, after Huston was elected as an Indiana State Representative and placed on Indiana’s education committee, Coleman hired Huston to be on the College Board. They are both profiting from the alignment of and AP courses and alignment of the SAT to the Common Core. And of course, Huston’s listed on Jeb Bush’s controversial Foundation for Excellence in Education. Even my own Republican Governor Herbert of Utah serves on the elite executive committee of NGA, the Common Core founding group. He doesn’t make money this way, but he does make lots of corporations happy.
I could go on and on about the Common Core gold-and-glory rush. I have barely touched the countless Democrats who promote Common Core for gain. But I don’t want to be up all night.
So, on to the liberals and/or not-right wing radicals who oppose Common Core:
Still, political funders of the standards and corporations selling its implementation try to get away with marginalizing the opposition. But it can’t be done honestly. Because it’s not a fight between left and right.
This battle is between the collusion of corporate greed and political muscle versus the individual voter.
It’s a battle between the individual student, teacher, or parent– versus huge public/private partnerships. That’s the David and Goliath here.
The Common Core movement is not about what’s best for children. It’s about greed and political control. A simple test: if Common Core was about helping students achieve legitimate classical education, wouldn’t the Common Core experiment have been based on empirical study and solid educator backing?
Did the authors of the Hogwash article really not know that Common Core wasn’t based on anything like empirical data but simply fluffed up on empty promises and rhetoric, from the beginning.
Where’s the basis for what proponents call “rigorous,” “internationally competitive,” and “research-based?” Why won’t the proponents point to proof of “increased rigor” the way the opponents point to proof of increased dumbing down? We know they are fibbing because we know there is no empirical evidence for imposing this experiment on students in America. The emperor of Common Core is wearing no clothes.
The National Review authors insist that Common Core is not a stealth “leftist indoctrination” plot by the Obama administration. But that’s what it looks like when you study the reformers and what they create.
First, let’s look at the Common Core textbooks. Virtually every textbook company in America is aligning now with Common Core. (So even the states who rejected Common Core, and even private schools and home schools are in trouble; how will they find new textbooks that reflect Massachusetts-high standards?)
Pearson’s latest textbooks show extreme environmentalism and a global citizen creating agenda that marginalizes national constitutions and individual rights in favor of global collectivism. The biggest education sales company of all the Common Core textbook and technology sales monsters on the planet is Pearson, which is led by mad “Deliverology” globalist Sir Michael Barber. Watch his speeches.
He doesn’t just lead Pearson, the company that is so huge it’s becoming an anti-trust issue. Sir Michael Barber also speaks glowingly of public private partnerships, of political “revolution,” “global citizenship” and a need for having global data collection and one set of educational standards for the entire planet. He’s a political machine. Under his global common core, diversity, freedom and local control of education need not apply.
But they are wrong in saying that Common Core isn’t a road map to indoctrinating students into far left philosophy. Power players like Linda Darling-Hammond and Congressman Chaka Fattah ram socialism and redistribution down America’s throat in education policy, while Pearson pushes it in the curriculum.
Study her further here to learn the groups she works for, what’s in the books she writes, how many times she quoted herself in her report for the U.S. equity commission, and what she said in last summer’s speech to UNESCO about the need to take swimming pools away from students.
So yes, there is an undeniable socialism push in Common Core textbooks and in the Department of Education.
Next.
The National Review’s authors claim Common Core won’t “eliminate American children’s core knowledge base in English, language arts and history.” By cutting classic literature by 70% for high school seniors, they are absolutely doing exactly that. The article says that Common Core doesn’t mandate the slashing of literature. Maybe not. But the tests sure will.
And that’s the tragic part for me as an English teacher.
Classic literature is sacred. Its removal from American schools is an affront to our humanity.
Common Core doesn’t mandate which books to cut; the National Review is correct on that point; but it does pressure English teachers to cut out large selections of great literature, somewhere. And not just a little bit. Tons.
Informational text belongs in other classes, not in English. To read boring, non-literary articles even if they are not all required to be Executive Orders, insulation manuals, or environmental studies (as the major portion of the English language curriculum) is to kill the love of reading.
What will the slashing do to the students’ appreciation for the beauty of the language, to the acquisition of rich vocabulary, to the appreciation for the battle between good and evil?
We become compassionate humans by receiving and passing on classic stories. Souls are enlarged by exposure to the characters, the imagery, the rich vocabulary, the poetic language and the endless forms of the battle between good and evil, that live in classic literature.
Classic stories create a love for books that cannot be acquired in any other way. Dickens, Shakespeare, Hugo, Orwell, Dostoevsky, Rand, Marquez, Cisneros, Faulkner, Fitzgerald– where would we be without the gifts of these great writers and their writings? Which ones will English teachers cut away first to make room for informational text?
The sly and subtle change will have the same effect on our children as if Common Core had mandated the destruction of a certain percentage of all classic literature.
How does it differ from book burning in its ultimate effects?
Cutting out basic math skills, such as being able to convert fractions to decimals, is criminal. Proponents call this learning “fewer but deeper” concepts. I call it a sin. Common Core also delays the age at which students should be able to work with certain algorithms, putting students years behind our mathematical competitors in Asia.
For specific curricular reviews of Common Core standards, read Dr. Sandra Stotsky’s and Dr. Ze’ev Wurman’s math and literature reviews in the appendix of the white paper by Pioneer Institute. (See exhibit A and exhibit B, page 24.)
Next.
The National Review claims that the standards “simply delineate what children should know at each grade level and describe the skills that they must acquire to stay on course toward college or career readiness” and claim they are not a ceiling but a floor. This is a lie. The standards are bound by a 15% rule; there’s no adding to them beyond 15%. That’s not a ceiling?
The article claims that “college and career readiness” doesn’t necessarily mean Common Core. Well, it does, actually. The phrase has been defined on the ed. gov website as meaning sameness of standards to a significant number of states. I would give you a link but this week, so oddly, the Department of Education has removed most of its previous pages. You can see it reposted here:
The article insists that Common Core is not a curriculum; it’s up to school districts to choose curricula that comply with the standards. Sure. But as previously noted: 1) all the big textbook companies have aligned to Common Core. Where are the options? 2) Common core tests and the new accountability measures put on teachers who will lose their jobs if students don’t score well on Common Core tests will ensure that teachers will only teach Common Core standards. 3) Test writers are making model curriculum and it’s going to be for sale, for sure.
The article falsely claims that “curriculum experts began to devise” the standards. Not so: the architect of Common Core ELA standards (and current College Board president) is not, nor ever has been, an educator. In fact, that architect made the list of Top Ten Scariest People in Education Reform. A top curriculum professor has pointed out that the developers of Common Core never consulted with top curricular universities at all.
The article claims that states who have adopted Common Core could opt out, “and they shouldn’t lose a dime if they do” –but Title I monies have been threatened, and the No Child Left Behind waiver is temporary on conditions of following Common Core, and for those states who did get Race to the Top money (not my state, thank goodness) the money would have to be returned. Additionally, every state got ARRA stimulus money to build a federally interoperable State Longitudinal Database System. Do we want to give back millions and millions to ensure that we aren’t part of the de facto national database of children’s longitudinal school-collected, personally identifiable information?
The article states that the goal is to have children read challenging texts that will build their vocabulary and background knowledge. So then why not read more –not less– actual literature?
The article also leaves out any analysis of the illegality of Common Core. The arrangement appears to be illegal. Under the Constitution and under the General Educational Provisions Act (GEPA) the federal government is restricted from even supervising education.
GEPA states: “No provision of any applicable program shall be construed to authorize any department, agency, officer, or employee of the United States to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, program of instruction, administration, or personnel of any educational institution, school, or school system, or over the selection of library resources, textbooks, or other printed or published instructional materials by any educational institution or school system…”
And for those still believing the federal government isn’t “exercising direction, supervision or control” of the school system, look at two things.
2. The federal mandate that testing consoria must synchronize “across consortia,” that status updates and phone conferences must be made available to the Dept. of Education regularly, and that data collected must be shared with the federal government “on an ongoing basis”
3. The recent federal alteration of privacy laws that have taken away parental consent over student data collection.
Finally: the “most annoying manipulation tactic” award for the National Review Article is a tie between the last two sentences of the National Review article, which, combined, say, “Conservatives used to be in favor of holding students to high standards… aren’t they still?” Please.
Let’s rephrase it:
Americans used to be in favor of legitimate, nonexperimental standards for children that were unattached to corporate greed and that were constitutionally legal… Aren’t we still?
Try this on for an explanation: it’s a speech she gave last summer at a UNESCO conference in Paris.
In the speech, Darling-Hammond says that “we allow this extraordinary inequality” in America which may cause us to “innovate our way to failure.” She shows a chart entitled “The Anatomy of Inequality” (see minutes 15:06- 16:00) that explains that taking away money from the areas of richer kids’ schools is a good idea (she mentions rich schools having too many swimming pools).
In her book, “A Flat World and Education: How America’s Commitment to Equity will Determine our Future,” she further explains why pushing for equity (communism) will solve the problems of education. The book illustrates poverty’s effect on education (tell us something we didn’t know) and she comes to the false conclusion that a governmentally forced attempt at financial equity (redistribution) can create better education. She doesn’t mention how this is to happen without harming individual liberty and without punishing the kids in financially stable schools.
Her ideas are being absolutely shoved down the throats of state school boards and legislators nationally.
And she is dead set on Common Core being the means to these ends. Always has been. She knew that others on the Common Core validation committee refused to sign off that the standards were legitimate; she was aware that common core would be an experiment on millions, implemented without any empirical data supporting its superiority claims. She not only supported this baseless decision making and the copyrighting and implementation of the common standards –but she’s now helping to write the common tests!
Darling-Hammond and her ideas are mentioned 52 times in the EEC report For Each and Every Child, a “strategy for equity report” that she co-wrote. In the words of Congressman Honda, another EEC member, it’s a “bold new vision on the federal role in education” that wants to see “transformations in school funding.”
Take a look at the EEC’s Opportunity to Learn Campaign. Included in the “opportunity” is also the cessation of any semblance of liberty. Dropping out is not an option; you can’t get suspended or expelled from school no matter how hard you try. The EEC calls this “positive discipline.” Also included in the “Opportunity to Learn Campaign” are “wraparound supports” such as extended learning time which might sound good until you realize that we’re moving away from a family-centered to a school-centered way of life that pushes parents to the periphery of children’s lives.
To translate: Linda Darling-Hammond pushes for communism in the name of social justice, for a prison-like view of schooling in the name of extended opportunity, and for an increased federal role in education in the name of fairness. She gets away with it because she comes across as sweetly compassionate.
But she scares me. And people who listen to her scare me too.
What does Obama really mean when he says that he created education reforms in 46 states during his presidency?
Words need context.
The word “education” and the concept of “education reform” as Obama and others use the terms, rest on our false assumption that reforms are positive in all contexts.
Many education reforms are being done under the public radar, without public knowledge, without any vote or citizen agreement, and they actually negatively affect student/citizen privacy –as well as harming certain academic –and also non-academic– outcomes.
We misplace our trust when we buy the idea that “education reforms” never make things worse, or never indoctrinate, or never promote dumbing-down, or never push unconstitutional or ungodly agendas, or that educational systems are never used to promote nice-sounding surface ideas that ultimately prove harmful. This misplaced trust will hurt us. Why don’t more people study and pay attention to what the government is doing to our educational freedoms and educational standards?!
Violations of good education are happening behind the unassailed assumption that “education” always means “good for children”. But it doesn’t. We have to study what the people behind the reforms stand for, to see where their trajectories are taking our children and ultimately, this nation. (Arne Duncan, David Coleman, Bill Ayers, Linda Darling-Hammond, Sir Michael Barber, Bill Gates, Joanne Weiss, Michelle Rhee…. the cast of characters is long, colorful and frightening.)
Obama and his cast of educational characters speak about pouring more money into “education” as if that is always beneficial. Well, that all depends on what they’re buying. (With our tax dollars and without our consent and without constitutional authority.)
Many assume he’s just talking about buying pencils, salaries and books. But new reforms do include indoctrination, corporate enrichment and yes, even dumbing down in some cases.
The recent Common Core reforms include DELETING most classic literature at the high school level, DELETING cursive for all ages, DUMBING Algebra I to 9th grade rather than introducing it to 8th graders, ending FERPA’s previously protective parental consent requirements before agencies and business people can access private student data; pushing the assumption that the United Nations are a positive force on earth; pushing the “green” extremist political agenda, and pushing most anything Bill Gates/Microsoft touches. To name a few. The data surveillance bothers me the most. Even though I am a lifelong English teacher and hate the fact that they’re slashing the literature increasingly, as the children work toward graduation. The closer to graduation they get, the less literature they will be allowed to read and write. It’s got to be info-texts, they say.
There are some ideas that some parents and teachers might like, and some we definitely don’t, but the fact remains that we never get a chance to weighin on them via a vote. That’s what nationalized education means: the elite at the top determine what is good and true for all. Oh, for the days of local control over education to be back in my state again!
Wearing the shield of “education reform,” guess what the education reformists on the left have wielded?
– a war on student data privacy
– a war on classic literature
– a war on traditional, time-tested math
-a national set of educational standards that is without an amendment process, so nobody can change anything.
-a national set of standards that are under copyright by an unelected group called CCSSO/NGA
-a national set of standards that the Dept. of Education has put a cap on; you can’t teach more than 15% above the Common Core
-a war against transparency;
Parents and teachers are in the dark; very few people know what all the consequences of adopting Common Core really are. And it’s deliberate. The Common Core is supposed to be “state-led” (because it’s illegal and unconstitutional for the executive branch to supervise or direct curriculum). So they are trying to make it appear to be so. They even invite people to help “write” the standards, even though the public license on Common Core says that CCSSO/NGA are the “sole developers” and “no claims to the contrary shall be made.” The half-truths are empowering the radical transformation and, ultimately, indoctrination of our kids to be government-centric collectivists stripped of the ability to self-determine, or to soar.
May I share the words of a great American? Ezra Taft Benson (who served as the Secretary of Agriculture under President Eisenhower in the 1950’s-1960’s and later as a Latter-day Saint prophet) said:
“As a watchman on the tower, I feel to warn you that one of the chief means of misleading our youth and destroying the family unit is our educational institutions. President Joseph F. Smith referred to false educational ideas as one of the three threatening dangers among our Church members… if [parents] have become alert and informed as President McKay admonished us last year, these parents can help expose some of the deceptions of men like Sigmund Freud, Charles Darwin, John Dewey, Karl Marx, John Keynes, and others. Today there are much worse things that can happen to a child than not getting a full college education. In fact, some of the worst things have happened to our children while attending colleges led by administrators who wink at subversion and amorality.” – In Conference Report, Ezra Taft Benson, 1970
President Benson also warned that communism was and is still a great, satanical threat.
How could communism ever become a real threat unless somehow people were taught to like its principles? How could it ever take root in freedom-loving America unless it were widely promoted as something good, diseminated via an information dissemination system (like government schools?)
One-size-fits-all is the name of the common core/socialist game. Individuality is marginalized or deleted; all is collective that is considered good. It’s the redistribution of educational funding and educational sovereignty. Common Core is a huge step toward socialism in America today, accepted because it’s sugar coated with pretty words: “education reform,” “rigorous standards” and “common core.”
I noticed that a political flier for a local Utah representative came in the mailbox yesterday. It touted as one of the candidate’s bragging points the fact that this candidate/incumbent had “protected public education from extremists.” I think he was referring to me, and the whole anti-Common Core crowd, thousands of us that will soon be millions, I venture to guess, as the truth trickles out almost completely unaided by mainstream media.
But my point is this: the candidate did not protect the public as he claimed to have done. He didn’t protect public education from extremists — Arne Duncan, Bill Ayers, Bill Gates, Michelle Rhee, Linda Darling-Hammond, Sir Michael Barber, and the rest got their wicked way. This local candidate did not understand who the enemy of quality education and educational sovereignty is. He thought the extremists were those who want us to sticking close to the spirit of freedom and individuality as supported in the U.S. Constitution. This is why I could not vote for him. I did a write-in vote. But he’ll win anyway, because most people do not have time to really care. And the Common Core’s moment of impact hasn’t happened for them yet.
According to Stanley Kurtz, whose Fox News editorial is excerpted below, one of Obama’s biggest plans to create socialism in America comes in the form of Common Core education. His book on the subject is in stores now: “Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities.”
Kurtz says that Obama is quietly promoting a dumbed-down national curriculum (called “rigorous”) that is designed to artificially suppress achievement gaps between urban and suburban students. Kurtz says that although the right way to help poorly performing students is not to gut standards but to raise achievement, still Obama is committed to defining performance down. What a way to equalize college readiness.
Kurtz concludes that Obama’s ultimate goal is to erase the differences between local school districts with a massive redistribution of suburban education spending to the cities.
What if President Obama’s most ambitious attempt to transform American society was also his quietest plan? You wouldn’t vote against the president on account of a program you’d never heard about, of course. That, I’d wager, is why President Obama has told the American public next-to-nothing about his plans to undercut the political and financial independence of America’s suburban school districts.
Obama is quietly busy making an end-run around our constitutional system, which forbids federal control of what your children learn in school. Step one, already well under way, is a dumbed-down national curriculum designed to artificially suppress achievement gaps between urban and suburban students. The right way to help poorly performing students is not to gut standards but to raise achievement, yet Obama is committed to defining performance down. That’s why the president’s ultimate goal is to erase the differences between local school districts with a massive redistribution of suburban education spending to the cities.
The 2008 controversy over Obama’s years of education work with that famously unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers has faded from view. For a moment, it seemed as though Ayers’ radical education legacy would carry forward into Obama’s presidency. That’s because Linda Darling-Hammond, Ayers’ favorite education expert and head of Obama’s education transition team, was on a fast track to appointment as secretary of education until her leftism alienated even many Democrats.
(LINDA DARLING-HAMMOND)
When Arne Duncan, who ostensibly backs demanding standards and tests, became education secretary instead, it looked as though Obama had tacked center. He hadn’t, and appearances to the contrary, neither had Darling-Hammond left the scene.
(BILL AYERS)
The core of the hard-left’s education agenda – a program shared by Obama, Ayers, and Darling-Hammond alike – has three parts: 1) a politicized curriculum that promotes leftist notions of “social justice,” 2) reducing “disparate outcomes” between students in different districts by undercutting standards, and 3) a redistribution of suburban education funding to less-well-off urban schools. Achieving these goals… requires the federal government to usurp local control of K-12 schooling.
(ARNE DUNCAN)
Obama is half-way there.
How did he do it? Instead of submitting his controversial education proposals to Congress and kicking off a vigorous national debate, Obama quietly marked $4.35 billion of federal stimulus spending for his Race to the Top education initiative. Since the stimulus bill was rushed through Congress with barely any debate on economic policy, much less education, Obama never had to go public with his plans.
By coordinating with outside groups not accountable to the voters, like the deep-pocketed Gates Foundation, the White House then orchestrated the creation of a national Common Core of education standards, with an accompanying curriculum and tests.
Supposedly, these standards have been voluntarily adopted by more than 40 states. In fact, by effectively conditioning eligibility for Race to the Top grants on participation in the Common Core, the Obama administration has forced economically pinched states to surrender control of their school curricula to the federal government. Cleverly, states have been pressed to sign on to the Common Core before the actual standards, curricula, and tests are revealed in a second Obama term. The entire scheme is arguably both illegal and unconstitutional. Yet it is moving forward, and the public knows virtually nothing about it.
A few conservatives have been fooled by the seemingly traditionalist call for national “standards.” Yet most conservative education experts understand that the new national standards will be low, not high. With so many pressing economic issues on the table, however, nobody’s listening. Too bad, because the ultimate outcome of Obama’s education scheme will actually be economic: a sweeping redistribution of suburban education funding to the cities. Far from having departing the scene, Obama’s former adviser, Linda Darling-Hammond, is at the center of this plan. She works with the Smarter-Balanced Assessment Consortium, selected by the administration to create the testing system for the new Common Core. Darling-Hammond has gone out of her way to downplay her role with the Smarter-Balanced Consortium, but the group’s own publications make it clear that she is effectively running the show. So, although Darling-Hammond is the top national opponent of standardized tests, she is now effectively in charge of designing a new K-12 testing system for much of the nation. The result will be politically correct questions, and standards that aren’t really standards at all.
That’s only part one of the plan. President Obama’s Department of Education has established an Equity and Excellence Commission, charged with finding “ways to restructure school finance systems to achieve equity in the distribution of educational resources and further student achievement and attainment.” Conveniently, the commission’s recommendations will emerge only during a possible second Obama term. Darling-Hammond is a member of that commission, and if past experience is a guide will have outsize influence on its recommendations.
Darling-Hammond has already made her intentions clear. She is pushing a plan to add common “resource standards” to the new Common Core’s curricular standards. That is, Darling-Hammond hopes to condition federal education aid on the equalization of school funding across municipal lines. She has also proposed allowing students to transfer across school district lines, with transportation provided at government expense. The target here is the suburbs. Obama and Darling-Hammond are both longtime supporters of the little-known “regional equity” movement, which aims to undercut the political independence of America’s suburbs so as to redistribute suburban wealth to the cities. Obama is too sharp politically to advertise this part of his program, yet he is aggressively pressing it forward.
The right to educate your children as you see fit has traditionally stood at the very center of the American vision of self-government and personal liberty… Agree or disagree, shouldn’t President Obama clearly explain his ambitious redistributive plans for K-12 education – and America’s suburbs – so that they can be discussed and debated during this epochal national election?
According to Stanley Kurtz, whose Fox News editorial is excerpted below, one of Obama’s biggest plans to create socialism in America comes in the form of Common Core education. His book on the subject is in stores now: “Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities.”
COMMON CORE 