The Plague of Common Core
Common Core
has more than one underlying purpose… One of them is to create a citizenry of
little robotic socialists with no mind of their own.
By de Andréa
Sept. 2,
2014
The Common Core school standards
imposed on teachers by Washington bureaucrats have been rejected by multiple
states, targeted by lawsuits and criticized as more indoctrination and/or
robotic programing. It will be used more
for the purpose of dumbing down the American population than education.
Now parents can take a whack at the Socialist
one-size-fits-all program that relegates George Washington to a half a sentence
and compares the Declaration of Independence to a high-school romance breakup
letter.
The Michigan-based Thomas More Law Center is
urging parents to opt their children out of the restrictive regulations and
requirements, providing forms to make the process easier.
“The opt-out form is based on the
constitutionally recognized fundamental right of parents to direct the
education of their children and on federal statutes which were designed to
protect student privacy,” said Richard Thompson, the chief
counsel for the organization.
“Our Founding Fathers recognized the
dangers to our freedoms posed by centralized control over public education.
However, today, all but a handful of state governments, enticed by millions of
dollars in federal grants, are voluntarily inviting the federal government to
take control of our public schools, imposing untested educational standards and
obtaining personal information on children and their parents which would make
any totalitarian government blush with envy,” he
continued.
“We must ever keep in mind, ‘The
philosophy of the classroom in one generation will become the philosophy of the
government in the next.’ Clearly, Common Core is a threat to individual privacy
and liberty, and to our constitutional republic,” he said.
His group has posted online a sample form to
help parents meet the requirements of Michigan state law, where Thomas More is
located. The group suggests it can be used as a template by attorneys preparing
similar forms in other states.
The form, above a line for a parent’s
signature, states “in accordance with the fundamental constitutional rights of parents
and legal guardians to determine and direct the care, teaching and education of
their children, and the relevant state and federal statutes, I hereby request
my child … be exempted and excused for the school year … from the following
check marked activities.”
There are options to exempt a student
from “any
and all standardized testing or activities required by law, under which
individual student data are collected and/or shared with the federal government
or other entities outside of the local school district; or are used for the
purposes of school, student, or teacher accountability, including but not by
way of limitation to, academic, achievement and annual tests, state-wide
performance assessments and Common Core State Standards aligned assessments and
pilots, computer adaptive testing and assessments designed by Smarter Balanced
Assessment Consortium (SBAC) or Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College
and Careers (PARCC).”
There is also an exemption from “tests,
assessments, or surveys not limited solely to proficiency in core academic
subjects.”
Other checkbox options include tests
that measure “values, attitudes or beliefs” as well as “any survey, analysis, or
evaluation that reveals information concerning my child, myself or other
members of my family.”
Such information could relate to “political
affiliations or beliefs,” “mental or psychological problems,” “sex behavior or
attitudes,” “legally recognized privileged or analogous relationships, such as
those of lawyers, physicians, and ministers,” “religious practices” or “income.”
It forbids: “The collection, tracking,
housing, reporting, selling, or sharing with any party outside of the local
school district, of non-educational related information on my child or my
family, including, but not limited to: religion, political affiliations,
biometric data, psychometric data, and medical information. Biometric data
includes fingerprints, retina and iris (eye) patterns, voiceprint, DNA
sequence, facial characteristics, handwriting, and any other unique physical
identifying traits. Psychometric data includes, but is not limited to:
personality traits, attitudes, abilities, aptitude, social and emotional development,
tendencies, inclinations, interests, and motivations. ”
Thomas More noted the flood of
criticism against the federal administrative program. For example, the Cardinal Newman Society, an
organization promoting faithful Catholic education, said Common Core is “nothing
short of a revolution in how education is provided, relying on a technocratic,
top-down approach to setting national standards that, despite claims to the
contrary, will drive curricula, teaching texts, and the content of standardized
tests. At its heart, the Common Core is
a woefully inadequate set of standards in that it limits the understanding of
education to a utilitarian ‘readiness for work’ mentality.”
While the stated goal is to make
educational standards consistent across the nation, problems include political
and “inappropriate
assignments,” links to for-profit corporations, advertising inside of
tests and the elimination of input from local school boards.
One major concern is the development of
a database detailing private information
on every student. The 400 individual data points for each student include
health conditions, religion, voting status, income, likes and dislikes.
The information, “through a complicated
network of contracts and agreements, can then be shared
with the federal government, contractors, researchers and other outside
agencies.”
“Testing corporations can then analyze
the test data, produce recommendations for how to ‘remediate’ student
weaknesses, and then sell that information back to states and school
districts,” the law firm said.
The Truth in American Education blog is endorsing the
opt-out effort.
“Now is the time for parents to protest
this intrusion by opting their child out of Common Core for the 2014-2015
school year.”
“Congress did NOT pass legislation
requiring Common Core standards to be implemented nor did Congress require that
standards, curriculum, and tests be aligned.
If parents allow the illegally formed U.S.
Department of Education to force policy upon the public as if that policy were
law, the parents will be surrendering more than parental involvement to the
federal government. How soon will it be before all parental rights are ceded to
the federal government?” the blog said.
Opposition to the federal mandates has
come from the Heartland Institute, the Home School Legal Defense Association,
Eagle Forum and others.
Fox News has reported Louisiana Gov.
Bobby Jindal filed a lawsuit against the Obama administration in federal court
over the issue.
The truth is that the Department of
Education illegally manipulated grant money and regulations to force states to
adopt the Common Core standards.
One of North Carolina’s largest
school districts condemned the College Board’s new Advanced Placement history
curriculum, which has direct ties to Common Core, calling it “a
deeply biased, inaccurate and revisionist version of American history”.
The New Hanover County Schools
Board of Education adopted a resolution Aug.
19 that calls for a one-year delay in the course‘s implementation.
David Coleman, known as the architect
of the Common Core national standards and its chief pitchman, just so happens
to be the president of the College Board, a private company based in New York
that owns the SAT and ACT exams as well as the Advanced Placement, or AP, exams
and curriculum. A conflict of interest
maybe?
“Coleman is now re-writing every
College Board product to align with Common Core,” said Meg
Norris, a retired public-school teacher in Hall County, Georgia, and an
anti-Common Core activist in that state.
The College Board not only owns the AP
curriculum but it administers the AP standardized tests nationwide to K-12
students, measuring their readiness to attend college. Coleman’s ties to the
controversial Common Core national education standards and the AP course’s new
take on American history has come under fierce criticism.
National Review reported the
College Board under Coleman is “politicizing” the teaching of
American history.
Officials
in North Carolina reported last week that
in light of the Common Core influence, home schools in the state rose 14.3
percent. The state reports there are 98,172 homeschoolers in the state.
Governors
in Oklahoma, South Carolina, Indiana and Louisiana have taken steps to distance
themselves from Common Core, either by working with
their state legislatures or by taking unilateral action.
THE BOTTOM LINE:
How did the Soviet KGB sell the ideology of Social Communism to the Russian
citizens? Answer, something very similar to COMMON CORE my friend. Common Core not only crosses the line from
education to indoctrination but it is at its very core, (no pun intended), a
form of robotic brainwashing to rewrite history among others, to erase all
traces of the free American Republic that began in the minds of our Forefathers
more than 200 years ago.
There has been a thrust since before
1913 to undermine and destroy the Representative Constitutional Republic that
our Framers designed as an experiment of freedom for America. And now Common Core will carry that agenda to
the goal of despotism that our Constitutional Architects so greatly feared.
My recommendation…A very well
researched private school or, HOME SCHOOL!
Thanks
for listening – de Andréa
If you
agree please pass this article on to everyone on your email list. It may be the only chance for them to hear
the truth.
Copyright © 2014 by Bottom Line Publishing - Permission to
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