Archive for the ‘Common Core Curriculum’ Category

COMMON CORE ROOTS LIE IN TIES BETWEEN BARACK OBAMA, BILL AYERS

Saturday, December 7th, 2013

 

Common Core Roots Lie in Ties Between Barack Obama, Bill

Ayers

In an article published on Monday that advocates for Common Core standards, the Associated Press presents what amounts to the typical talking points for supporters when faced with criticism that Common Core is a federal takeover of education.

The standards were created by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers to improve academic achievement and increase accountability. President Barack Obama and his administration embraced them.

Actually, Barack Obama did not simply “embrace” a concept that others developed; instead, the very roots of Common Core are in the early ideas generated by him and his fellow radical community organizer, Bill Ayers.

Just prior to the presidential election of 2008, Dr. Stanley Kurtz, Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, wrote an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal in which he observed that then-Democrat presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama’s “most important executive experience” was heading up the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), an education foundation that was the invention of Bill Ayers, founder of the Weather Underground in the 1960s.

Obama led the CAC from 1995 to 1999 and remained on the board until 2001. The foundation funneled more than $100 million into community organizations and radical education activists. (more…)

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VIDEO – COMMON CORE – TENNESSEE HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT

Friday, November 15th, 2013

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NC TEACHERS SPEAK UP ON COMMON CORE

Wednesday, September 18th, 2013

 

CIVITAS INSTITUTE

NC Teachers Speak Up On Common Core

As schools across North Carolina begin teaching classes based on the Common Core standards, it is timely and appropriate to consider the views of the people who are closest to the new curricula: teachers.

The superintendent of the Department of Public Instruction, June Atkinson, has insisted that teachers were a crucial part of the state’s planning process for Common Core. But teachers have been remarkably quiet on the subject, perhaps fearing that vocal opposition could lead to retaliation from administrators. For the first time, that has changed: the Civitas Institute conducted an informal nonscientific survey of public school teachers in North Carolina. We received responses from over 1,700 teachers from 71 different school districts that yielded some interesting results. Teachers reported serious reservations about Common Core Standards, with 62 percent of polled teachers favoring the delay or halt of Common Core implementation.

Civitas has previously described the results of the survey, but now we are publishing some of the individual responses. There are a lot of hard-working, passionate teachers whose opinions warrant our attention.  Regardless of their position on Common Core, they’ve earned the right to be part of the discussion.   Here are what a few of them have to say about Common Core Standards:

TEACHERS CRITICIZE COMMON CORE STANDARDS

“Is this just a new face on an old clock…?”

“[Common Core] teaches to the middle and puts low expectations for all students.”

“STOP THE TEST DRIVING INSANITY and give teachers more time to do what actually improve[s] student learning – CLASSROOM TIME TO TEACH!”

“[Common Core] seems to be just another ‘Flavor of the Month’ and within five years it will be replaced.”

“Our system and individual schools are doing their best to introduce a curriculum that no one can really define. The CC although wordy is still vague in many ways and left open to many different interpretations.”

“…we were not given proper materials to implement these standards in our classrooms. We have been ‘flying the airplane, while building it’!”

“I traded a Cadillac curriculum for a Pinto.” (more…)

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THE MOST DANGEROUS DOMESTIC SPYING PROGRAM IS COMMOM CORE

Monday, September 9th, 2013

 

 
03 Sep 2013
by Joshua Cook

http://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/school-bus-gps-tracking1.jpg

Photo Credit: ben swann
 
Earlier this year, revelations about the Department of Justice spying on the Associated Press were quickly followed by revelations that the NSA was collecting phone data on all Verizon, and then all American cell phone, users. Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing drew yet more attention to the issue, and domestic surveillance programs have remained a top issue in people’s minds ever since.
 
While Americans focus on institutions like the CIA and NSA, though, programs are being implemented which would lead to a much more institutional way of tracking citizens. Obamacare is one of these, but Common Core Standards – the federal educational program – is the most eyebrow-raising.
Bill Gates was one of the leaders of Common Core, putting his personal money into its development, implementation and promotion, so it’s unsurprising that much of this data mining will occur via Microsoft’s Cloud system.
 
Even the Department of Education, though, admits that privacy is a concern, and that that some of the data gathered may be “of a sensitive nature.” The information collected will be more than sensitive; much of it will also be completely unrelated to education. Data collected will not only include grades, test scores, name, date of birth and social security number, it will also include parents’ political affiliations, individual or familial mental or psychological problems, beliefs, religious practices and income.
 
In addition, all activities, as well as those deemed demeaning, self-incriminating or anti-social, will be stored in students’ school records. In other words, not only will permanently stored data reflect criminal activities, it will also reflect bullying or anything perceived as abnormal. The mere fact that the White House notes the program can be used to “automatically demonstrate proof of competency in a work setting” means such data is intended to affect students’ futures.
 
Perhaps even more alarming is the fact that data collection will also include critical appraisals of individuals with whom students have close family relationships.  The Common Core program has been heavily scrutinized recently for the fact that its curriculum teaches young children to use             *1   emotionally charged language    to manipulate others and teaches students how to become *2  community organizers and *3  experts of the U.N.’s agenda 21.
 
 
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COMMON CORE – AN OBAMA ADMINISTRATION EDUCATION INITIATIVE

Thursday, August 22nd, 2013

 

Media Matters Calls Common Core ‘An Obama Administration Education

Initiative’

Kyle Olson

8/22/2013 12:01:00 AM – Kyle Olson

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The radical attack group Media Matters obviously didn’t get a copy of the White House Common Core talking points.

Defenders of the national education standards like to insist that the initiative was “state-led” and is therefore not a federal takeover of the public education system.

But in its attack on Fox News for airing a video clip about Common Core’s new way of doing math, Media Matters accidentally spoke the truth: the standards are “an Obama administration education initiative.”

As if that weren’t already obvious. The Obama administration dangled millions of dollars under the noses of cash-hungry states a few years ago to entice them into adopting the standards, which weren’t even developed at the time.

The president and his staff clearly worked very hard to get this initiative off the ground.

Yet Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has become increasingly defensive over questions and criticisms of the new, untested standards.

In a June speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Duncan insisted that the federal government was not a leading force behind Common Core.

He has also pleaded with U.S. Chamber of Commerce officials to be “more supportive of the Common Core because it was coming under withering attack.”

“It seems that a big part of Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s job now is giving impassioned defenses” of Common Core, a Washington Post story said.

If Duncan and the administration have no stake in Common Core, why would they so vigorously defend it? If it was simply a “state-led” initiative created and pushed by governors, why would Duncan’s dander be up?

In its zeal to defend anything related to the Obama administration, Media Matters slipped up and said what everybody already knows: Common Core is the administration’s baby. And that means we can all be worried about how much the feds plan to intrude in the operation of local school districts

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VIDEO – THE INDOCTRINATION OF COMMON CORE

Monday, August 12th, 2013

May 2013

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VIDEO – THE ORIGIN OF COMMON CORE STANDARDS

Monday, August 12th, 2013

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ROTTEN TO THE CORE

Sunday, August 4th, 2013

 

Rotten to the Core: Jeb Bush’s Crony Republicans Against Higher Standards

 
By Michelle Malkin  •  August 2, 2013

images

Here’s a new installment of my Rotten to the Core series on education and curriculum. This latest scandal has only just begun. I hear from multiple sources that there are more damaging e-mails to come. Jeb World is getting rocked not only by this mess, but by the nationwide, grass-roots revolt against his top-down Common Core scheme — which continues to grow despite Bush’s latest p.r. efforts to bamboozle talk radio and conservative pundits about his education racket.

This is a battle not between left and right, but between right and wrong.

Previous:

Rotten to the Core, Part 1: Obama’s War on Academic Standards
Rotten to the Core, Part 2: Readin’, writin’ and deconstructionism
Rotten to the Core, Part 3: Lessons from Texas and the Growing Grassroots Revolt
Rotten to the Core, Part 4: The Feds’ Invasive Student Tracking Database
Time To Opt Out of Creepy Fed Ed Data-Mining Racket
Rotten to the Core: Reader feedback from the frontlines
My child’s Common Core-aligned Algebra book is crap
Rotten to the Core: Conservatives spearhead drive at RNC meeting to stop Common Core
Today: Twitter rally to stop Common Core
Who’s tracking your children?
Stop Common Core Twitter list
***

Jeb Bush’s Crony Republicans Against Higher Standards
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE:  Heather Crossin, a conservative Indiana mom who helped spearhead the drive to eject Bennett from office and reject Common Core in her state, put it best. She told me after the latest crony Republican education scandal this week:

“This situation illustrates why it is crucial that parents be reinserted into the decision-making process when it comes to the education of their children. When their voices and concerns take a backseat to ‘command and control’ approaches to ed reform, the public trust can easily be broken.” It’s elementary.

The resignation of Florida Education Commissioner Tony Bennett couldn’t have come at a better time. His disgraceful grade-fixing scandal is the perfect symbol of all that’s wrong with the federal education schemes peddled by Bennett and his mentor, former GOP Gov. Jeb Bush: phony academic standards, crony contracts, big-government and big-business collusion masquerading as “reform.”

Bennett stepped down Thursday after the Associated Press reported that he had meddled with charter school accountability ratings in Indiana last fall while serving as that state’s schools superintendent. The beneficiary of his intervention? Big GOP donor and charter school operator Christel DeHaan, who has forked over nearly $3 million to Republicans (including $130,000 to Bennett).

DeHaan’s Christel House Academy charter school magically went from a “C” rating to an “A” rating despite failing 10th-grade math scores. An abysmal 33 percent of the school’s 10th-grade Algebra I students passed. Note: The school uses the widely panned elementary-level Everyday Math curriculum (which I’ve exposed in previous columns) and a newfangled secondary program called the Carnegie Learning Math Series, whose website prominently brags that its “courses were developed to align to the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics.” More on that in a moment. (more…)

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CONDEMNING THE COMMON CORE

Tuesday, July 23rd, 2013

 

NEW MEDIA JOURNAL
Condemning the Common Core
Tabitha Korol
July 22, 2013

As I began working through my second Common Core textbook, Contemporary Human Geography 2e, again authored by James M. Rubenstein, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, and published by Pearson, I became stunningly aware of an agenda beyond our initial suspicions.

First, that Common Core, by design, was created to “remold the entire American system” into a “system of labor-market boards at the local, state, and federal levels,” where curriculum and “job-matching will be handled by government functionaries” (penned by Mark Tucker, president of the National Center on Education, in a 1992 letter to Hillary Clinton.) I contend that this is more than an interest in job skills, but a way of removing American identity from the learning generation.

Not only have they removed classes in civics, history, our nation’s foundation and traditional values, but they have ensured the erasure by discontinued cursive writing from the curriculum, the same script used for our original official documents, including the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, to make them indecipherable and insignificant. Gone are the studies in economics, needed for creative, entrepreneurial job opportunities, the country’s growth, and the arts, a reflection of the culture. How different is this from the book burning events of Nazism and other conquering tyrannical regimes? Further, the students will suffer a 60% cut in reading classic literature, poetry and drama, including the works of Charles Dickens, Edith Wharton, and Mark Twain, and the introduction of Algebra-1 and, by extension, advanced math will be delayed. From this information alone, it appears that the next generation is destined to become the drones of a worker society, not the citizens of an exceptional nation.

As I began to read Contemporary Human Geography 2e, it became obvious that it contains too many subtopics for depth, so they are treated imprecisely and erroneously, and described as having “extremely serious failings” and reflecting “very low expectations.” One parent was quoted as saying, “One major flaw that we found in the Common Core curriculum is that the above-average student is treated the same as the average student, which is a tremendous waste of potential.” Teachers are already ignoring students’ outstanding achievements for the “common good.” The students will be equal – in underperformance, and the Common Core is now recognizable as mediocrity.

Second is what Aaron Klein, WND’s senior staff reporter and Jerusalem bureau chief, brought to light – that President Obama has initiated an online connection between all US schools and the Qatar Foundation International with Qatar’s $49.2 million devoted to this education-reform project (founded by Weather Underground and terrorist William Ayers, with Obama as its first chair).

Due for completion by 2016, “Connect All Schools,” located in DC, is funded by the Qatar government, which is close to the Muslim Brotherhood, Carnegie Corporation, the Annenberg Foundation, American Society for Muslim Advancement, and Students for a Democrat Society. The purpose, explained by the Middle East Forum, is “the establishment of the Islamist goal of world domination.” Qatar is an overwhelmingly Muslim-majority country with Islam as the state religion since 628 a.d. and one of two Wahhabi states in the Arabian Peninsula, the other being Saudi Arabia. The other country is Kosovo, whose Islamism dates back to the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans from Christianity in 1389. The program’s first launch was October, 2010, when these countries connected with Middle/High schools in DC and Boston for a “cultural exchange and service-learning program.” Further, “curriculum grants” were awarded to seven US schools to “develop comprehensive and innovative curricula and teaching materials to be used in any Arabic-language classroom.” It is not such a stretch, therefore, to realize that the ultimate objective is to replace American history with Islam’s history, and cursive writing with Arabic calligraphy.

Third, that the publisher, Pearson, provided an introduction that gives us further cause for concern: “Sustainability Initiatives: environmental challenges…crafted to minimize environmental impact…minimize waste, energy consumption, use of harmful chemicals. “Along with developing and exploring digital solutions to our market’s needs, Pearson has a strong commitment to achieving carbon-neutrality. As of 2009, Pearson became the first carbon- and climate-neutral publishing company . . . remains strongly committed to measuring, reducing and offsetting our carbon footprint. To minimize our impact on Earth.”

This new revelation indicates Common Core’s purpose – to minimize our society’s impact on Earth, and our students’ impact on this dominated nation. The purpose is to obstruct our advancement as a civilization by erasing our history (an important method of conquest, used by Islam throughout the Middle East) and abandoning all creativity and problem-solving capabilities. The textbooks are designed by the leaders to form our common core, perhaps combining Islam with socialism and George Soros’s “One World Order,” to be governed by the United Nations. It appears that we are being guided back to the Middle Ages, when the great civilizations were conquered, the barbarians were rampant, and the masses were willing to be ruled by their lords for handouts and considerations – a return to feudalism when most of the citizens were serfs.

In the words of Ayn Rand, “We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.”

Remember our administration’s circumventing our Constitution, Bill of Rights, and our Founding Father’s teachings and the use of executive order to force changes. Remember how we are to be “politically correct,” and careful not to mention words that offend Islam. Remember how many of our people would be willing to give up their weapons of self-protection and their rights to speak and vote for the sake of promises of free cell phones and free healthcare. We are heading toward sameness, mediocrity, and submission to the will of others. Are all these part of a bigger picture? Agenda 21?

Please see this link for my review of Contemporary Human Geography 2e (pdf).

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NORTH CAROLINA LT. GOV DAN FOREST QUESTIONS IMPLEMENTATION AND ADOPTION OF COMMON CORE STATE STANDARDS

Tuesday, July 23rd, 2013

 

July 22, 2013

Everything You Wanted to Ask About Common Core, and More

By Ann Kane

North Carolina’s Lieutenant Governor Dan Forest has written a set of over 200 questions challenging the state superintendent of public schools to explain in detail the adoption and implementation of the Common Core State Standards — before the State Board of Education’s scheduled August 7-8 meeting.

 

Lt. Gov. Forest’s bold approach to finding the underlying cause of the CCSS in his state no doubt will be answered with attacks, as speaking truth to power rarely results in transparency on the latter’s part.  By questioning authority, the Lt. Gov. is showing us how to resist the tyranny of the minority.

 

Dr. June Atkinson, NC Superintendent of Public Instruction, in a June 12 letter defending CCSS, has already begun a counterattack on why “a pause in the implementation of the Common Core” would be detrimental.  She implies that the entire educational structure would fall apart and that such an action would lead “to not teach students how to read, write, speak, listen, and learn math such as adding, multiplying, dividing, subtracting, etc.”  To which Forest in #26 returns with “North Carolina did not use the CCSS standards until this past school year. Do you believe that we have not been teaching our students to read, write, speak, listen, and learn math for the past several decades?”

 

Then, this past Friday, the Department of Public Instruction returned another volley at the Lt. Gov.  On his Facebook Forest writes, “DPI asked that I supply 10,000 pieces of paper so that they could answer my questions.”  He sent them the requested reams.  DPI could be pulling all-nighters.

 

It doesn’t appear that anyone checked out the ramifications of the CCSS before the state adopted them in 2010.  The National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers released the standards on June 2, 2010, and North Carolina’s SBE adopted them two days later.  There was no legislative debate and no real public debate (there was a two-month window for public comments, but who knew?).

 

In his inquiry, Lt. Gov. Forest broaches the topic of international standards under the section entitled “Development of Standards” when he asks, “Who created the international standards to which the CCSS is benchmarked?”  Maybe he knows the answer already, but he wants to see if the chief of schools knows it. (more…)

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