Common Education Data Standards (CEDS)

My husband often says, “Truth is truth, whether people believe it or not.”

Here’s the truth that even the Common Core’s lead architect, David Coleman, and its main funder, Bill Gates openly admitted in the videos below:

1.  The Common Core was never state led.  If it had been, it would have been constitutionally legitimate.  It would have represented voters’ informed consent and desires.  It  would have a built-in a states’ amending process.  It would have represented and standardized something vetted, not this untested theory, this not parentally authorized, not teacher-authorized, not voter-authorized, experiment on, and tracking of, children.
2.  The Common Core is greed-led.  It was not an educator but a businessman, David Coleman, who wrote his ideas on a napkin, and brought them to the second richest man on earth, Bill Gates. Gates saw the potential: using standardized data systems, educational standards and tests (and tax dollars) they’d forge what he called, in the video below, a “uniform base of customers” nationally.  While Coleman pitched the idea to a partial club of governors and a partial club of state superintendents ( who bought it, and claimed it, and copyrighted it after hiring Coleman’s company, Achieve Inc., to produce it). Gates paid anyone who would take his millions, to promote it.

To this day, the private trade groups NGA and CCSSO claim that they are the “state” originators of the Common Core.  That defies common sense and the structure of U.S. government. We have legislatures to represent voters; NGA and CCSSO are not legislative bodies.

I believe in capitalism and I cheer for entrepreneurs who make money legitimately; but Common Core is not legitimate business.  It took over political processes. It represents the takeover of voters’ rights.  It is collusion: between businessmen who have no authority to determine educational processes, and the federal government.  Think that’s just some wacky theory?

Look at this link  from the CCSSO’s website. It’s clear evidence of the collusion which went behind constitutional rights of states and which destroyed checks and balances, by  setting education policy centrally.  Only the feds, married to these nonlegislative and private organizations, call the shots here:

The Common Education Data Standards Initiative is a joint effort by CCSSO and the State Higher Education Executive Officers (SHEEO) in partnership with the United States Department of Education.

So the same superintendents’ club (CCSSO) that partnered with the partial governors’ club (NGA) to copyright a Common Core for math and English, also partnered with the feds to standardize a common data mining program with CEDS standards, nationally.

 

 

Video One:  Bill Gates

Bill Gates telling legislators to “unleash” the forces of a “uniform customer base” by using Common Core

Video Two:  David Coleman

Businessman David Coleman explaining that he personally persuaded governors to sign on to Common Core, a business idea he plotted on a napkin

 

 

Despite the fact that the #StopFedEd / Stop Common Core movement has become politically huge, and that many people know the truth about Common Core, many people still believe that it’s a harmless initiative, and that the Common Core was “state-led”.

Who could blame them for believing so? The promoted “talking points” said so.  These were marketed by power-wielders: Bill Gates, the U.S. Dept. of Education, the paid-off National P.T.A., and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce –and were passed along by state boards of education and local boards of education to teachers and parents who trusted those lines.  Few fact-checked. The lie got passed along and believed.

 

Common Core is not primarily an academic argument; it’s a takeover of local authority.

A good friend recently asked, “What’s so bad about the federal government controlling local education?”

If you know socialist/communist countries’ educational malpractices and propaganda machines; their lack of creativity,  lack of joy,  condemnation of faith, and lack of truth, you will not ask this question.

If you know that there is zero constitutional authority for the federal government to make decisions about education for American schools, you will not ask this question.

But if you don’t know or believe that, just think about your own desires for your children and grandchildren.

If you desire to have an ongoing voice of authority in your child’s education, his/her testing, and his/her data privacy, you cannot support federal education nor Common Core.

The Common Core allows nobody but its copyrighters to amend it.  Its tests are held secret, even after the tests are over.  The SLDS databases collect data on your child according to federal designs, and it is only a matter of time before this aggregated data will be legalized in disaggregated form. These are questions of personal power and personal conscience.  Over time, it is ultimately a question of religious liberty, because the freedoms of conscience and of action are freedom of religion.

Who has God-given authority over what goes into your child’s open mind?  Business sectors and federal government? –Or parents, with the consented-to assistance of teachers and perhaps a local school board?

If programs (such as Common Core and Common Educational Data Standards) do not allow for user amendability,  for personal conscience to input change, then they are on day one, already corrupt.  They are, or will be, tyrannical.

Remember the founders’ words: “consent by the governed“.

Because businesses and federal agencies have centralized education power, local and state input has been rendered increasingly powerless.  Where was consent?  I can’t even opt out my own child out of the CEDS/ SLDS child-inventorying machine, my state tells me.

This is why the chairman of the National Governors’ Association (NGA), Utah Governor Gary Herbert, failed to secure the nomination in last week’s state GOP convention.  This is why that same governor was so loudly booed at the Utah County GOP convention by most of the 1,500 delegates in the audience, every time he said that Utah had control of education standards locally.  They knew the truth.

The governor/NGA chair either didn’t know it, or didn’t believe it.

Suggestion:  Don’t call Common Core “state-led” anymore, because millions of Americans realize that –even though well-meaning people were duped and then promoted it in good faith– Common Core has always been a solely greed-led collusion between the business sector and the federal government.

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WHAT COMMON CORE REALLY DOES TO EDUCATION

Let me share my recent experience with you.

While I teach 10th grade English, part time, at a non-common core, classical, traditional, private school called Freedom Project Academy (FPA) I also tutor, for free, neighbors and friends.

The comparison between my private, not-common core school, and the local public school, in English Language Arts, is stunning.

Background:  FPA is an online school that recognizes no governmentally-set educational standards.  It recognizes  time-tested books as standards: the Bible, the classic works of literature, and the classic works of math, etc.  It does not promote “informational text” articles, as Common Core does.   FPA tenth graders read the following works of literature cover to cover, and wrote about them this year:  The Old Man and the Sea; Romeo and Juliet; Murder on the Orient Express; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn;  The Scarlet Letter.  Fantastic!

Meanwhile, local public school teenagers who have come for help with their essays let me know that they were assigned “mostly articles” and very few books.  Their essay assignments were based on articles about “gender-based toys” and “green cars of the future” –clearly, these young people were being fed the progressive agenda under the banner of “English Language Arts”.

I told them that they are being robbed of real education, and that they should get some real books, especially classics, on their own, and read all that they can.

How can students who are being made to read “informational articles” ever gain the depth of perspective, the insight and humanity found in the rich characters and stories of Hawthorne and Shakespeare and Hemingway?

Common Core apologists are quick to point out that there’s no prohibition against Hawthorne, Shakespeare and Hemingway in Common Core.  But Common Core businessmen have made curriculum that is sold and bought nationwide, which is “informational article” heavy, not classics-heavy.  The businesses are thus driving what goes on in the classroom, as imagined by noneducator David Coleman, who openly mocks the teaching of traditional, narrative writing.  This is not representative governing of education policy!

Talk to your local public high school students.  Ask to see what they are being asked to read and write about.  I would love to know if my town is an isolated case of losing classic literature.

Video Three:   Here’s Coleman, mocking traditional narrative writing, in an effort to  promote his notion of reading and writing mostly informational text in English classrooms.

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Lastly–  NATIONAL COMPREHENSIVE SEXUALITY STANDARDS – aka “Amorality for All”

The centralization/nationalization  is not just about English and Math.  It is clear in the push for national science standards (Next-Generation Science Standards) which Utah has tragically now accepted.  It is clear in the common alignment of tests and data mining to the illegitimate Common Core and CEDS– whether tests are the Utah SAGE, other states’ PARCC, the College Board’s SAT and AP, or other tests.

Centralization of power away from localities is clear, and most dangerous, in the push for national sexality (amoral) standards, CSE, Comprehensive Sexuality Standards  (which Utah considered and rejected for now).  The video below explains why it is not true that Comprehensive Sexuality Standards are simply about “medically accurate information” but are instead teaching children amorality, which is so important to the progressives’ anti-family, anti-God agenda.

Don’t watch it with children in the room.

 

Video Four:  The War on Children–  The Comprehensive Sexuality National Standards:

 

 

We are not a communist country. Why are we acting like one, in centralizing so many matters of children’s education?  There is nothing secretive about what’s going on; no conspiracy theory here, but conspiracy fact:  progressives proclaim that government, not family, owns the children and defines for children what is true, good, moral, healthy, or allowed.

 

Video Five:  Progressives’ announcement that government, not parents, own children:

 

 

We need the fire of Patrick Henry to wake America.

“Give me liberty or give me death!”Patrick Henry  spoke those words, as if to us.

Many today seem to fear taking a stand for parental control, state control, local school board control.  Do not fear the pretentious monster! It has no constitutional, no authoritative, legitimacy. Our rights, given by God and protected by the Constitution, are legitimate.   Your authority over your own children is legitimate.  Own it.  Act like it.  It is only when each person stands in his or her place, firmly, against encroachment, that a free country remains free.

Patrick Henry’s words  apply today to the takeover of authority, which is Common Core and Common Data Mining, which is in the process of stealing our God-ordained duty to determine what our children will be taught:

“[W]e are not weak, if we make a proper use of the means which the God of nature hath placed in our power. Three millions of people, armed in the holy cause of liberty, and in such a country as that which we possess, are invincible by any force which our enemy can send against us.

…There is a just God who presides over the destinies of nations, and who will raise up friends to fight our battles for us.  The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave. Besides, sir, we have no election [choice]. If we were base enough to desire it, it is now too late to retire from the contest. There is no retreat, but in submission and slavery.”