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Video surfaced on Thursday showing Michael Mulgrew, president of New York’s United Federation of Teachers, as he unloaded a hateful rant against critics of the Common Core Standards Initiative. “If someone takes something from me, I’m going to grab it right back out of their cold, twisted, sick hands and say it is mine!” Mulgrew bellowed clownishly. “You do not take what is mine!” The union boss also challenged opponents of Common Core and union control over education to a fist fight. “I’m going to punch you in the face and push you in the dirt because this is the...

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) called on state lawmakers Thursday to pass a bill in January that would repeal the Common Core standards and replace them with “standards set by people in Wisconsin.” According to the Wisconsin State Journal, Walker released a statement Thursday afternoon, just hours after two Republican state senators, Leah Vukmir and Paul Farrow, issued a joint press statement calling for a delay in the use of the Smarter Balanced Assessments (SBAC) that are aligned with the Common Core standards. Earlier in the year, Walker helped draft a bill that would create a state board to replace...

The Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that the Legislature had the authority to repeal Common Core education standards for English and math in the state's public schools. ... Conservative groups maintained that the standards represented federal intrusion into Oklahoma's public education system, and Gov. Mary Fallin signed into law legislation repealing the standards last month.

by Gina Cassini | Top Right NewsOne student got tired of being dumbed-down by Common Core's convoluted "standards" to do basic arithmetic. "Standards" like how to add two numbers, which the student was told to do like THIS: WHAT? It's enough to make you pull your hair out. So when he was given his next basic arithmetic assignment, to find the difference between 180 and 158 (180-158), this 5th grade student just did it his own way -- the right way -- and dissed Common Core with single, awesome word:

She was Miss Florida for just six days. After organizers realized there had been a vote count error with last Saturday’s pageant, Elizabeth Fechtel, a 20-year-old student at the University of Florida, was dethroned on Friday. The ballot counter at the event, which was held in front of 2,000 spectators in St. Petersburg, didn't see that one of the five judges had changed his mind, writing a new line up on the left-hand side of his ballot.

“People focus too much on race,” says T.W. Shannon, a sixth-generation Oklahoman and member of the Chickasaw Nation. What’s more important, he says, is “what you believe and how you’re going to govern.” (SNIP) When asked about other political figures who inspire him, Shannon names Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor. That would not have been the first response of most attendees at CPAC, where libertarian Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) won a straw poll as the preferred next presidential candidate. Shannon says he likes Bush’s stance on education. It’s a tragedy, he adds, that the number one determinant of a...

In the past week, Governors Haley of South Carolina and Fallin of Oklahoma evicted Common Core from public schools, even at the risk of losing hundreds of millions of federal dollars promised to states adopting it. Mmes. Haley and Fallin initially supported Common Core. But public outrage is forcing them to reverse course, and more states will follow. In New York, the Republican-Conservative challenger to Governor Andrew Cuomo, Robert Astorino, vows to topple Common Core if he wins in November. Move over Obamacare. Mid-term elections will also be referendums on ObamaCore. Contrary to what the public is told, Common Core...

The Sutter Buttes Tea Party Patriots invite you to a Town Hall meeting to discuss the State of California’s introduction of Common Core Standards curriculum. There will be a panel of experts led by Paul Preston, Agenda 21 Radio. The purpose of this Town Hall meeting is to bring you up to date on the state’s agenda to implement Common Core Standards in our school system. What are Common Core Standards? What can we do to stop their implementation? The panel will be open to questions and suggestions from the audience. Everyone is welcome to attend. There is no membership...

A new study released by the Boston-based Pioneer Institute finds that new technology development that has been encouraged through the use of federal grants has served to threaten children’s privacy by allowing the collection of data on every child. Authors of the study Emmett McGroarty, Joy Pullmann, and Jane Robbins make the case that by means of the nationalized Common Core standards, which states were lured into adopting through competitive grants in the Obama administration’s Race to the Top (RttT) stimulus program in 2009, the federal government has used grant funds to induce states to build identical, increasingly sophisticated student...

Nevada dad John Eppolito got a bad case of sticker shock when he asked state education officials to see the permanent records of his four children. He was told it would cost $10,194. A Lake Tahoe-area real estate agent by trade and a fierce opponent of Common Core, Eppolito was concerned about Nevada's recent decision to join a multi-state consortium that shares students’ data. He wanted to know exactly what information had been compiled on his school-age kids. But state officials told him he would have to pay fees and the cost of programming and running a custom report. “The...

School officials said they will be rewriting a controversial essay question developed through the Common Core guidelines that asks eighth graders to consider whether the Holocaust a “real event” or “merely a political scheme created to influence public emotion and gain.” From the San Bernardino Sun: The district says the assignment is merely to teach students to evaluate the quality of evidence made by advocates or opponents of an issue. “When tragic events occur in history, there is often debate about their actual existence,” the assignment reads. “For example, some people claim the Holocaust is not an actual historical event,...

I get a lot of e-mail from parents and teachers who wonder if President Obama, whose children go to the private Sidwell Friends School, knows what is actually going on with all of the standardized testing in public schools. Here’s an open letter to Obama explaining what he is missing, written by Rebecca Steinitz, a literacy consultant in urban high schools, a writer and an editor. She was previously director of the High School Program at Lesley University’s School of Education and an English professor at Ohio Wesleyan University, where she ran the Freshman Writing Program. Steinitz is also a...

A school district asked the police to prohibit certain students from setting foot on school property because their parents had privacy concerns about Common Core-aligned standardized testing, and wished to opt their kids out.The incident happened at Marietta City Schools in Marietta, Georgia. The Finney family didn’t want their three children — in third grade, fifth grade and ninth grade — to participate in the state-mandated Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests, partly because of the vast amounts of data the government is collecting about their children, and partly because they think the tests don’t serve a compelling educational interest, according to The...

From its beginning, the Common Core State Standards initiative has flown under the radar. Its funding, its implementation, and the substance of the standards it proposes have received little public attention, but all of them are questionable. What troubles me the most is how fast these standards were adopted and how little transparency there was in the process. Not one state legislature voted on the Common Core standards. In the forty-five states where they have been adopted, it was by an act of the governor, the state secretary of education, or the state board of education. The people most affected...

Liz Phillips, Brooklyn principal: I have never seen a worse ELA exam. Other principals agree. See below comment from Liz Phillips, principal of PS 321 in Brooklyn, who was scathing about the 2012 exam as well, but says this one was as bad or worse. One would think with all the controversy and parents opting out, NYSED and Pearson would be careful to construct a better set of exams. But perhaps they are simply incapable of doing so. PS 321 PARENTS--Our 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders have just completed three days of the New York State English Language Arts Exam....

Missouri elementary teacher Susan Kimball testified before the Missouri Senate Education Committee that she has been threatened and bullied for her opposition to Common Core.

Tea party activists have been waging war for months against the Common Core academic standards. Now, in a coordinated show of muscle, Big Business is fighting back — and notching wins. The urgent effort stems from a sense among supporters that this is a make-or-break moment for the Common Core, which is under siege all over the country. A coalition including the Business Roundtable and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce will launch a national advertising blitz Sunday targeted at Republicans skeptical about the standards. Spots promoting the Common Core will air on Fox News and other conservative outlets.

WARNING: Warning: this article contains sexually explicit material. A New York mother of a kindergarten student discovered links to lewd material on the New York State Education Department “Engage NY” Common Core website. The site offers a link to help young students prep for tests and quizzes, when she clicked on the link she was directed to a sex survey website. The link was active on the NYSED website since October 2012. via Bretibart: The New York State Education Department (NYSED) site contained a section called “Make test prep fun,” which directed students to a site with quizzes that help...

Another high school student at Farragut High School in Knox County, Tenn. is receiving widespread attention for an eloquent speech he made against Common Core at a school board meeting. This time the student, Kenneth Ye, gave a rousing speech before the Knox County school board urging it to drop the Common Core standards because they make learning joyless and, in fact, turn American schools into something approaching Chinese sweatshops. “Our schools are being turned into data-run factories,” Ye charges around the 4:30 mark in the video, “factories based on speedily-approved standards that are now being implemented around the country.”...

A Tennessee high school senior is receiving widespread attention for an eloquent speech he made against Common Core at a school board meeting. Ethan Young, a senior at Farragut High School in Knox County, Tenn., made an impassioned argument for dropping the new national education guidelines, which he called “a glowing conflict of interest … that illustrate a mistrust of teachers.” “Somewhere our Founding Fathers are turning in their graves,” he said. Young reserved particularly harsh judgment for the nationwide standardized testing required by Common Core. “If everything I learned in high school was a measurable objective: I haven’t learned...