Few parents actually know
what Common Core Education is. Teachers who are finding out do not seem to
care, let the state fight it out. For teachers, it is a means to an end; the
end translates into keeping their jobs and a paycheck coming in this tough
economy which the current administration celebrates as a “recovery” from a
self-induced coma.
Although touted as a means
to improve education standards, the Brookings Institution said, “The empirical
evidence suggests that the Common Core will have little effect on American
students’ achievement. The nation will have to look elsewhere for ways to
improve its schools.”
The Department of
Education paid two Washington, D.C., organizations, the National Governors
Association’s Center for Best Practices and The Council of Chief State School
Officers, to come up with the Common Core national standards. (Pioneer
Institute)
According to Lance Izumi,
author of Obama’s Education Takeover,
the President “strong-armed the states into adopting these Common Core standards
through a number of devices, principally through the Race to the Top
competition through federal grants.”
The Race to the Top $4
billion “historic” grant scheme was awarded to states “leading coherent,
compelling, and comprehensive education reform.” The grant was authorized under
the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
The Department of Education
at the federal and state levels had developed many experimental programs that
promised to be breakthroughs in education but were discarded later as giant
wastes of time and taxpayer dollars while the achievement levels had continuously
declined.
Arne Duncan, the Secretary
of Education, described Core Standards as an important tool for international
competitiveness, access to high quality education, and a way to prepare “all
students for college, work and citizenship. These standards are an important
foundation for our collective work.”
I emphasized “collective” because that is what Common Core is about,
indoctrination into the “collective” mindset.
In spite of the fact that
we have different brains, IQs, learning styles, and God-given talents, Common
Core standards insist that “all children can and should learn to high
achievement standards based on a “universal design for learning.” This would be
achieved by having different sets of standards based on race, ethnic
background, socio-economic background, and disability, a type of “separate and
unequal” education. All students will receive the same diploma but for “unequal”
work in mathematics and reading and for “unequal” achievement.
Furthermore, a video surfaced that shows that wrong answers in math are acceptable under Common Core standards as long as students can explain how they got the wrong answer and feel good about it. http://www.libertynews.com/2013/07/unbelievable-common-core-shill-says-new-education-does-not-require-students-to-have-right-answers-only-that-they-explain-how-they-got-answer/
Furthermore, a video surfaced that shows that wrong answers in math are acceptable under Common Core standards as long as students can explain how they got the wrong answer and feel good about it. http://www.libertynews.com/2013/07/unbelievable-common-core-shill-says-new-education-does-not-require-students-to-have-right-answers-only-that-they-explain-how-they-got-answer/
The states who adopted the
Common Core Standards were excused from the detested No Child Left Behind Act
which set the standards too high for low achievers and low motivators who are
not really interested in education. It is criminal and sad to see semi-literate
individuals receive diplomas when they cannot actually read or write, cursive
or otherwise, very well and are glorified by the MSM for speaking Ebonics.
“Beginning this fall,
Alabama public schools will be under a new state-created academic
accountability system that sets different goals for students in math and
reading, based on their race, economic status, ability to speak English and
disabilities.” (Tuscaloosa News)
The English Arts
Curriculum textbooks used in Utah, called “Voices, Literature and Writing,”
emphasize the Democracy Plan, preparing students for community organizing. The
German poet Goethe, a classical liberal, warned us that democracy is
incompatible with liberty. He said, “Legislators and revolutionaries who
promise equality and liberty at the same time are psychopaths.” Even Hans
Hermann Hoppe of the Ludwig von Mises Institute said, “Political centralization
would lead to the destruction of the culture.”
The Utahans Against Common
Core has mounted an opposition. A short video shows the first grade textbook, Voices, Literature, and Writing, that
teaches nothing about literature or writing.
Instead, “In the Voices of Democracy theme, students use their voices to
advocate solutions to social problems that they care deeply about. They are
engaged in learning the following theme-related social knowledge and skills:
social role models, social advocacy, and respect for each other. They learn to
develop a Democracy Plan in which they develop ways to help people in need.” My
six-year olds thought about recess and play, reading, writing, and arithmetic. Is
this what first graders do now, they think about ways to organize people in
their communities to fix social problems? This is community organizing; this is
communism, not literature and writing. http://www.utahnsagainstcommoncore.com/usoe-recommends-social-justice-curriculum-materials-for-1st-grade/
In the same series of
books, educators are directed to teach first graders about emotional words of
anger and fear in order to accomplish their social justice goals. The workbook
gives the following example, “My mom_____ (tells) (nags) me to clean my room.” Students are supposed to choose “nags” because
it is an emotional word of anger. If a student chooses “tells,” the answer is
incorrect. Students are taught about feelings instead of logical thinking and parents
are marginalized as some annoying individuals who nag their children. Would the
collectivist village take over the rearing of our children?
Homework activities
include practicing being upset and angry because “feelings cause people to act.”
Is there any wonder that we have the Occupy Wall Street mobs, angry mobs, flash
mobs, and people talking over each other? Liberals are taught to be ruled by
feelings and not by logic.
Are these curriculum
materials limited to first grade? No, all grades have the same theme, the Democracy
Plan. By third grade teachers must “measure attitudes, believes, and
dispositions,” making specific notes on the Student Observation Form whether “growth
and change in individual students behavior and attitudes is observed. One
rubric asks, “Does the student use the plural “we” and “our” to advocate ways
to solve social problems?” In other words, I and my, individualism, are frowned
upon. Behavior and attitudes are measured in each grade and teacher check marks
are made for each student under the rubrics, Beginning, Learning, Proficiency,
or Mastery.
I remember receiving pass
or fail grades under communism for good or bad behavior at the end of each
semester. Parents were called in, humiliated and criticized in front of
everybody if their child had a bad grade in behavior. Both parents and child
had to undergo an attitude adjustment in line with the communist propaganda.
According to Michelle
Malkin, the 2009 stimulus package contained a State Fiscal Stabilization Fund
offered to states for a “longitudinal data system (LDS) to collect data on
public school students” such as health, family income, religion, and homework. http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/343040/common-core-trojan-horse-michelle-malkin
The Blaze described a
44-page Department of Education report which indicated the possibility of
implementing through Common Core monitoring techniques such as “functional MRIs”
(scanning and mapping a child’s brain function), “using cameras to judge facial
expressions, electronic seats that determine posture, pressure-sensitive
computer mouse, and a biometric wrist wrap.” http://theblaze.com/stories/2013/03/27/indoctrination-and-data-mining-in-common-core-heres-why-americas-schools-may-be-in-more-trouble-than-you-think/
Is this what we are trying
to do with Common Core standards? Force every student into a
government-dictated and enforced mold, dumbing down the curriculum so much that
everyone appears equally intelligent, equally capable, equally trained, equally
able? The focus will no longer be education, the classics, language, government,
mathematics, science, history, chemistry and individual achievement in those
fields but social justice, activism, and community organizing for the socialist
collective?
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