I was just going to the Utahns Against Common Core Facebook Page to share my “Thank You” letter with my friends. (I’d written a letter to thank the representatives who had voted no on HB164, the bill that would cause any child to fail a class whose parents opted him/her out of the SAGE/AIR (invalidated, common core, federally aligned tests).
But when I got to that Facebook page, my friend Wendell had posted a link to a new version of HB164.
The monster is back.
I don’t understand how!
I don’t understand how an ugly, evil, unconstitutional bill like HB164, after having attracted a packed room of angry parents last week, and after having been voted down by a vote of the legislative committee, can now be back for another vote.
I pray those nay-voting legislators will see lines 76-79 and will say, “No. I still do not like Green Eggs And Ham!”
But who knows?
Who’s being manipulated, threatened, or bribed at the legislative level– and by whom?
Who knows? There’s no investigative reporting being done in Utah by any newspaper on the subject of education industry corruption, or the education industry’s machinations at the Utah State Office of Education.
There should be. The education sales industry is one of the biggest, most money-making industries in the world. And Utahns are probably the most trusting, gullible, and least fact-checking groups of people on earth.
The facts are stacked against the trusting little guy.
The governor of Utah is the president of the National Governors’ Association, the group that co-created and copyrighted the Common Core and co-promoted the Common Educational Data Standards movement. To deliver that product, Utah’s Governor Herbert himself created Prosperity 2020, a movement that aligned Utah businesses and chambers of commerce with the common core and common data mining projects now in pre-K-12 and higher ed.
From Governor Herbert’s point of view– and especially in an election year, when his opponent, Jonathan Johnson of Overstock, is openly fighting Common Core and common data mining projects– while Gov. Herbert’s supporters, the Chambers of Commerce, etc., are making so much money on this monstrosity (at the expense of real, good education and student privacy, of course)– from that point of view, HB164 HAS TO PASS.
It has to pass, for the monster to live.
If it doesn’t pass, then that lynchpin of power and control doesn’t get settled in to take over; if people can opt out of the data collection tests, then the data isn’t usable, and the whole monster feeds on data, data, and more data. Nonconsensually gathered, private, individually-custom built, student longitudinal data. The State Longitudinal Database System is the mechanism. Schools feed it every day.
If the testing opt-out movement seriously catches on fire here in our state, then SO MANY ENTITIES LOSE MONEY AND POWER. Governor Herbert is one. The Chambers of Commerce are another. School Improvement Network is another.
Even the federal government will be hit hard, if enough parents and students opt out, since federal ESSA, passed last December, calls for 95% of all students taking the same federally aligned tests and giving up that student data for “user profiling” of all citizens.
The same God who put children first in His heart and in his kingdom said that you cannot serve God and mammon. In this state, a supposedly religious state, it is sad to say that there is a tremendous amount of top-level USOE and Chamber of Commerce hypocrisy going on.
Children are being put last. Money is being put first.
Ironically, and evilly, the money is being made under the banner of making children’s lives better. That’s all Prosperity 2020 ever talks about– the future of the economy, for the children.
But tell me this: how does any of this bless a child, when a child is, under HB164, forced to take a test and is forced to expose his or her private data in a user profile that in no way blesses him or her, but benefits the central planners?
Is it right? Children, forced to take a test, despite parental reservations. Forced to take a test, despite the fact that the test has never been validated. Forced to take a test, despite the fact that the standards upon which the test rests, are experimental and are far from the time-tested, classic standards for real education that their parents knew.
Forced. Forced. Forced.
Think about this.
If HB164 passes, when that now-much-smaller group of non-test takers actually fails classes, when the first group of normally A+ children fail full grades in school –because their parents stood up, using their consciences and Constitutional freedoms, against this monstrosity, because that will happen—how will Governor Herbert look into our eyes and shake our hands at the local Rodeo?
How?
COMMON CORE 