Posted on 10/18/2013 4:36:33 AM PDT by Kaslin
As an outspoken critic of the federal academic standards scheme known as Common Core, I'd like to offer some friendly advice to opponents. Stop insulting. Stop digging. Stop projecting. Start listening.
Central planners in Washington have been caught off-guard by the grassroots revolt against the national standards/testing/curriculum juggernaut. Real input from the hoi polloi was never a part of the grand implementation process. So when parents and educators in dozens of states started challenging the privacy intrusions posed by and the constitutionality, cost, quality and validity of Common Core, its architects went on the attack.
And now, the education control freaks are freaking out.
Former GOP Florida Gov. Jeb Bush accused moms and dads who've vigilantly fought dumbed-down curricula firsthand of foisting "mediocrity" on their own kids.
Bush, Mike Huckabee, Chamber of Commerce types and Gates Foundation promoters routinely have insulted Glenn Beck and his listeners as conspiracy-mongers for raising red flags about Common Core's data-mining agenda.
A Fordham Institute "expert" arrogantly suggested that actively involved parents like me were somehow confused about which materials have been "aligned" to Common Core, even though we're the ones sitting down with our kids to help with incomprehensible homework and error-riddled texts every night in our own homes.
Heavy-handed school-board members and state educrats are taking cues from these elitist leaders. When they're not mocking dissenters, they're stifling them. Maryland parent Robert Small was threatened with arrest and falsely accused of assaulting a police officer because he dared to challenge a Common Core Kabuki forum.
In North Carolina, a parent writes that her principal refused to meet with a group of moms and dads concerned with dumbed-down Common Core math lessons. Moreover, the parent told the Truth About Education blog, the principal issued an effective gag order when she "outright told me to stop communicating with other parents about the Common Core because I was generating 'unrest.'"
In Colorado, parent Natalie Adams was slapped with a no-trespass order by Jefferson County officials last week after challenging her district's new boondoggle expenditures on Common Core-tied technology marketed by inBloom (a nonprofit school data-sharing conglomerate funded by the Gates and Carnegie Foundations, with architecture built by Wireless/Amplify, a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation).
In a classic case of psychological projection, New York Education Commissioner John King sneered at parents and teachers who attended his Common Core dog-and-pony show as "special interests." After droning on uninterrupted for an hour and a half, King finally allowed two-minute statements from the audience. Parents balked at their kids being used as "guinea pigs" for untested teaching methods; educators challenged Common Core's assessment-obsessed, one-size-fits-all approach. King petulantly cut off testimony only 20 minutes into the feedback session to filibuster and grandstand -- and then proceeded to cancel future forums.
King dug his hole further by accusing parents of being "manipulated." But Leonie Haimson, a New York City public school parent, pointed out: "So far six out of nine states have pulled out of inBloom or put their plans on hold because of protests from privacy experts and parents in Louisiana, Georgia, North Carolina, Kentucky, Delaware and Massachusetts."
"Commissioner King's claim is not only insulting to parents; it reveals how out of touch he is," Haimson wrote this week in an assessment that sums up the problem with countless Common Core mouthpieces. "He seems unable to comprehend how parents' desire to protect their children's privacy is rational and to have the right to decide with whom their children's most sensitive information, including their names, addresses, test scores, disabilities and disciplinary records, is being shared is completely justified."
In my home state of Colorado, dissent from both conservative and liberal parents forced Jefferson County to allow individual "opt-outs" from the inBloom data-mining machine. The Gates Foundation responded by pouring $5 million into the district for "innovative professional development systems to create personalized learning systems for teachers." How do you spell special interest payoff?
Not only do these education emperors have no clothes. They have tissue-paper thin skin. Their arrogant, contemptuous and vengeful treatment of dissenting parents and teachers gets a world-class "F." Listen up:
We parents of school-age children are all Robert Smalls and Natalie Adamses and Leonie Haimsons. We, not the Obamas or the Bushes or the Gateses or educrats in Washington, are our children's primary educational providers. Control over our children begins and ends with us.
It is not easy to stand up and challenge sovereignty-undermining, curriculum-usurping, privacy-sabotaging education orthodoxy, especially when it is plied with a toxic alliance of both big-government and big-business interests.
But if we don't do it, who will?
I am so sorry......I just didn’t expect this.
Commom core ping
Just like Obamacare exemptions - there will be something similar for testing of students - that’s my guess.
The point is that homeschool parents should be aware of the agenda which is to shut down homeschoolers and get involved. Call your local board of education or do whatever you can to stop common core.
Now that you (and daughter and sil) know, what will you do?
As a taxpayer, YOU are likely paying for all the ads.
to make room for nonfiction texts such as “How to Re-Imagine the World.”
**************
Beck article tells about re-imagining America
Glenn Beck ‘Horrified’ by ‘America’s Latest Propaganda Machine’
Excerpt:
Among the topics the individuals were caught on tape discussing was the fair redistribution of wealth and how “we’re funding the arts through the Cultural Development Fund, which is upwards of $20-some-odd million funding our cultural communities.”
Beck also said Imagining America was created by Bill Clinton, and that its membership now includes roughly 90 universities including Columbia University, Brown University, the University of Chicago, and more.
Many receive funds from the Soros-linked Tides Foundation, Beck added, in addition to various government grants.
Imagining America - TheBlaze
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dx0im4a9Go8
While it is shocking that a known work of fiction is being replaced by overt propaganda, TKAM is very mediocre fiction that is only two degrees away from agitprop.
She is unhappy with Common Core and she needs to talk to the principal....(we just found out about this)
Don't you love how "critical thinking" has come to mean "unthinking adherence to the Marxist party line -- or else"?
Speaking of Hitler, does anyone remember when there was no such thing as leftist science? It was just science. There was also plain mathematics, no left or right.
Except in Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union. Big insane asylums like that had politically correct science and math.
If parents don’t personally attend school board meetings, make a fuss and not relent until they get results, they should withdraw their children. That hits the school where it hurts: in many districts they lose more than $10k per pupil withdrawn.
Enough people do that, change for the better might be expected.
That said, I do not for a moment believe that public education is a good thing, an improvable thing, an excusable thing. I am simply endorsing activism within the system for those parents whose eyes are still sealed.
Good article. Thanks for posting (I’d have missed it otherwise).
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