Free Republic

Election 2016: Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush embraces one-size-fits-all national education standards that would turn schools into re-education camps for the left. His decision could cause trouble with GOP primary voters. As is the tradition these days, Jeb Bush, brother of one former president and son of another, has announced via social media that he is preparing to run for president, setting the stage for another Bush-Clinton contest in 2016 should former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton get the Democratic nomination. To be the Republican nominee, Bush must run a gauntlet of primaries where he'll need to persuade Tea Party...

10-year-old Elizabeth Blaine dropped the mic at a Montclair, New Jersey, school board meeting Monday night, sharing her support for a policy that lets parents opt out their children from taking the Common Core test, also known as PARCC (Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers). "I love to read. I love to write. I love to do math. But I don’t love the PARCC. Why? Because it stinks," Elizabeth said. "This is crazy!" she continued. "I am one of the most gifted students in my grade (or so my mom says) and I have not...

The pro-amnesty and open borders Wall Street Journal wants former Florida Governor Jeb Bush to not back down on Common Core and amnesty, the two issues that may represent the greatest divide between the bipartisan political class and Main Street. The Journal, which Bush has hailed as his "paper of record," argued that Bush was right when he recently said during a Journal event that a Republican must be willing to "lose the primary to win the general" election."Mr. Bush’s two main political liabilities in the primaries are said to be his support for immigration and for Common Core education standards," the Journal opined. "Neither is...

Jeb Bush is exploring a 2016 presidential bid. The former Florida governor said in a post on Facebook Tuesday that over the Thanksgiving holiday there was a lot of discussion about the future of the nation. “As a result of these conversations and thoughtful consideration of the kind of strong leadership I think America needs, I have decided to actively explore the possibility of running for President of the United States,” Mr. Bush said. Mr. Bush said he plans to establish a Leader PAC next month to “help me facilitate conversations with citizens across America to discuss the most critical...

In addition to major telecommunications firms aiming to influence the public debate on net neutrality, there’s the Ford Foundation, the second-largest private foundation in the world. “If you are a foundation for justice in the world, and you don’t understand that the Internet is going to be a major battleground in this century, and you’re not engaged in that fight and supporting people who are concerned about access and security, you’re going to be left out of one of the most important justice issues of the day,” Foundation President Darren Walker told the Council on Foreign Relations this summer. “And...

The Wall Street Journal's Beth Reinhard chatted with Americans for Tax Reform's Grover Norquist about Jeb Bush's refusal to sign Norquiest's pledge never to raise taxes and his comments a few years ago that he could support a deficit reduction deal that entailed $1 in tax increases to every $10 in spending cuts: ....Mr. Norquist said the 2012 hearing came at a time when “Republicans were all holding out on not raising taxes, and he was a guy from Florida, a former, washed-up politician from Florida not involved in that fight…and he jumps in says, ‘I’d raise taxes.’ You’re either...

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Thus, no matter how full-throated the endorsements of Common Core by such worthies as former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, the parents go marching on. “Colorado Springs School District 11 struck a blow against the Common Core by voting to remove the majority of its students from the new, mandatory standardized tests,” Chris Neal wrote in School Reform News this month. “District 11, which has nearly 30, 000 students, announced it plans to randomly test the minimum number of students needed to meet the federal requirement, allowing the rest to opt...

Is former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush too moderate for the Republican Party? That is all the talk. But here’s a surprise: Adam C. Smith, political editor of the liberal Tampa Bay Times, authored this piece last Friday refuting with evidence that Bush as governor was “arch-conservative” and far from a “moderate squish.” — Ed. Respected Ronald Reagan biographer Craig Shirley told the Washington Examiner recently that Jeb Bush is the latest in a line of Bushes who oppose Reaganism. Radio host Mark Levin has dismissed Florida’s former governor as “a very good moderate Democrat,” while pioneering conservative activist Richard Viguerie...

OSCEOLA COUNTY, Fla. — More than 20 teachers have resigned or decided to retire from the Osceola County School District in just the past month -- and the district already had a shortage with more than 50 vacant teaching jobs. The teachers’ union told Channel 9’s Deneige Broom that some of them quit because they're fed up with standardized testing. At Kissimmee Elementary, they need to fill two spots. At the nearby middle school, three spots are open.

The roster of actual mathematicians taking issue with the math in Common Core grows. “In mathematics, mastery of several calculation skills is delayed by one or two grade levels when compared with the standards recommended by the National Mathematics Advisory Panel (NMAP),” David V. Anderson writes in Replacing Common Core With Proven Standards of Excellence, a study published by the Heartland Institute. “Common Core specifies only three years of high school mathematics, compared to the traditional four years of instruction recommended by NMAP.” Anderson is a retired research physicist and fellow of the American Physical Society who has taught high...

Gov. Bobby Jindal continued his attack on the Common Core academic standards Sunday in an appearance on Fox News. Jindal has sued the federal government, saying the mathematics and English benchmarks are tantamount to a national curriculum and illegally infringe on state sovereignty. "This is a violation to the 10th Amendment of the Constitution. Existing federal law says that the federal government shouldn't make curriculum decisions," he told host Chris Wallace Sunday. snip

A little-known aspect of Common Core should have students worried about what goes on the dreaded "permanent record," say critics of the national education standard. Parents in Pennsylvania have written outgoing Gov. Tom Corbett to demand a moratorium on the collection of what they describe as sensitive and personal information on students, which they say is part of a federal database to track the development of every child. And education activists around the nation say it is part and parcel of the controversial campaign to impose a uniform, national standard for math and English. “This follows them from the cradle...

Few Americans who entered polling booths for the Nov. 4 election and pulled the lever for their favorite candidate for Senate realize that for most of American history, senators were chosen by the state legislatures. It wasn’t until 1913 that the 17thAmendment was passed, granting American voters the constitutional right of directly electing their senators.While this important amendment may seem innocuous, the reality is that few other changes to our Constitution have had the same detrimental effect on our nation than this single, nearly forgotten alteration.The passage of the 17th Amendment was driven largely by the populist movement of the...

Jeb Bush is steeling for a fight with the GOP’s conservative base, signaling he will not bend from his centrist positions on immigration and Common Core education standards in 2016 — even if it costs him support with grassroots conservatives. In what could be read as a swipe at 2012 GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, Bush told a Washington audience this week that “no one really knows” if a presidential candidate can survive the primaries without sacrificing his core principles because “it hasn’t been tried recently.” The former governor of Florida also told the CEO Council forum sponsored by The...

Two years ago, Bobby Jindal was pushing a state law to adapt national curriculum standards to local schools; today, not only is the Louisiana governor suing the federal government to stop Common Core — or “ObamaCore,” as many Republicans have taken to calling it — but most prospective Republican presidential candidates, except Jeb Bush, have reversed themselves. Likewise, two years ago, almost all GOP leaders were unified against gay marriage, supportive of most surveillance tactics designed to prevent terrorism attacks, opposed to a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and unwilling to accept any aspects of the Affordable Care Act....

Even though moderate Republican candidates lose presidential elections without the conservative base (see: George H.W. Bush '92, Bob Dole '96, John McCain '08, Mitt Romney '12), former Florida Governor and potential presidential candidate Jeb Bush thinks conservatives are not needed to win the White House. Bush believes that a presidential candidate who is "willing to lose the primary to win the general" has the best shot at the White House. *snip* Should Bush run, his embrace of comprehensive amnesty legislation and Common Core will put him at odds with conservative voters in the early primary states.

"Do you just want your kids to be test machines and cheap workers for corporations?"Lily Tang Williams, a mother of three, testified before the Colorado State Board of Education that Common Core was similar to the education she received growing up in Mao’s Communist China. “Common Core, in my eyes, is the same as the Communist core I once saw in China,” Williams said. “I grew up under Mao’s regime and we had the Communist-dominated education — nationalized testing, nationalized curriculum, and nationalized indoctrination.” In a post at FreedomWorks, Williams wrote about her experience with the Chinese education system: Our...

[Summary; Ray Rice made a mess of his life. Arguably, David Coleman is making a mess of American education.]....Early morning hours. They got drunk and had a fight. She spit on him and hit him. He hit her back. She was unconscious on the floor. A punch or a slap? Too drunk to stand up? Initially, the event was treated as a trivial physical altercation. A month later they got married. Next, Rice was indicted on a third-degree assault charge and accepted into a first offender’s program. Now the wife was saying, please leave us alone and stop talking about...

Islamic supremacism is taught in American public schools, one of which is Porter Ridge High School in Union County, North Carolina. A ninth-grade world-history teacher assigned an in-class worksheet about Islam which the pupils had to fill in with the "correct" answers (the worksheet's first part is in the above picture). FALSITIES TAUGHT AT SCHOOL Some of those answers were that Islam is a peaceful religion, Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the world and most Muslims' faith is stronger than the average Christian. Islamic Scriptures and history are testament to the fact that the exact opposite of the...

The federal government has restored Oklahoma’s flexibility to decide how to use $29 million in public school funding, state officials said Monday. The U.S. Department of Education had withdrawn Oklahoma’s waiver from portions of the No Child Left Behind Act in August, after legislators dropped Common Core guidelines that would have been in place for the current school year. Replacement guidelines—the ones in place before Common Core—weren’t certified until October as being capable of making high school graduates ready for college or the workplace. …