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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...

HILLSBORO, Ore. – Nine parents pulled their seventh- and eighth-graders out of math class and started teaching them at home, because they are upset with the new Common Core curriculum that public schools in Oregon are starting this year. Seventh-grader Amy Craig has always been an "A" student in math until this year. She came home with a "D." The same thing happened to other students in her school. So their moms got together and decided to teach math themselves – an hour every morning. Then the kids go off to school for the rest of the day. This is...

A mother in the Bryant School District in Arkansas -- a district using the controversial Common Core curriculum -- was surprised to learn her sixth-grade daughter was given a team assignment to revise the Bill of Rights, pruning two amendments from the Constitution while adding two others, Twitchy reported Monday, citing a report at the Digital Journal. The assignment made the assumption that the United States government has determined that the Bill of Rights “is outdated and may not remain in its current form any longer.” The children were to assume the persona of “experts on the Constitution and the...

Florida Governor Rick Scott issued an executive order Monday rejecting the Common Core educational initiative adopted in 2010 by the Florida State Board of Education (BOE) and endorsed by former Gov. Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Florida’s Future as a “Federal government intrusion” into his state’s right to set its own academic standards.

Glenn Beck told his audience on Monday that the arrest of a Maryland father who was asking questions about Common Core is frightening evidence of the country moving further along the path that he says goes from “nudge,” to “shove,” to “shoot.” For those unfamiliar with the terms, Beck explained that “it’s how every Marxist utopian dream begins.” “You start simple, with just a little ‘nudge,’” he said. “It’s Cash for Clunkers. It is trying to figure out a way to make energy prices ‘necessarily skyrocket,’ to nudge you into hybrids.”

Once a clear Common Core supporter, Scott is in a political bind. Tea party groups, which make up an important part of his base, want Florida to jettison the new standards and tests. But schools across the state are already teaching Common Core, and Republican leaders in the House and Senate are standing behind the benchmarks. The Common Core standards outline what is expected of students at each grade level but do not include suggestions for books or how teachers should plan their lessons. The benchmarks, created by the National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers, have...

A conservative group which helped organize the famous March on Washington says it was left out of the seminal civil rights event's 50th anniversary celebration held Wednesday. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) was one of the six big organizing groups who coordinated the 1963 March on Washington 50 years ago. However, CORE says none of the event organizers at this year's remembrance of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech invited anyone from the black conservative organization, particularly CORE's chairman and '63 March on Washington alum Roy Innis (pictured), to speak.

ObamaMath is coming!Remember in the 1960′s when the pointy-headed nitwits tried “New Math” on kids? I sure do. It was a total failure so… hey! Let’s try it again!Quick: what’s 3 x 4?If you said 11 — or, hell, if you said 7, pi, or infinity squared — that’s just fine under the Common Core, the new national curriculum that the Obama administration will impose on American public school students this fall.In a pretty amazing YouTube video [below], Amanda August, a curriculum coordinator in a suburb of Chicago called Grayslake, explains that getting the right answer in math just doesn’t...

Larry Grathwohl, who had just come back to Cincinnati from Vietnam, was infiltrating the domestic terrorist group Weatherman, the only one to have done so. Larry saved potentially hundreds of lives when he alerted the FBI to a bomb placed near a Detroit police station and a restaurant. Bill Ayers, Education Secretary of Weatherman, told him that in the revolution, lives would have to be sacrificed. ... My interest in Bill Ayers began a few years ago when I learned about his career as a “Distinguished Professor of Education.” In reality he was working to destroy everything that was good...

Just 31 percent of the state’s students in grades 3 to 8 were deemed proficient in math and in English language arts (ELA) on the new tests, compared with about 65 percent in math and 55 percent in ELA on last year’s tests. Kentucky, another leading-edge state implementing its own common core tests, experienced similar declines in scores last year. Most of the 45 states that have signed on to the Common Core are waiting until at least 2014-15 to implement common tests that are still in development. For those who support the Common Core, a set of standards for...

Gov. Nathan Deal complains there has been much “misinformation” spread about the new Common Core national standards that Georgia adopted in exchange for a federal Race to the Top grant. Indeed, he’s right, but not in the way he believes. One critical piece of misinformation is the claim that the Common Core math standards are more “rigorous” than our previous Georgia Performance Standards. Research shows the truth is quite the opposite. ... Common Core national standards will set our children back one to two years. The math standards specifically are markedly inferior to all three sets of standards used for...

A group of Woodland Park parents and educators want to get rid of the Common Core Academic Standards that are being implemented in Colorado Schools. Teller County Citizens Against Common Core Standards maintains the new academic guidelines aren't as good as the ones in place. It also argues that the system is unconstitutional because it takes local control away from school districts. It may lobby Woodland Park School District RE-2 and the state to drop out. "We want to get the word out. The standards were just a money carrot for the state to get federal money," ... Among other...

Full Title: ‘Really Spooky’ Poem Praising Common Core Allegedly Recited by Dozens of 5th Graders at School Ceremony – Read It Here A substitute teacher in North Carolina recently sent Glenn Beck a copy of a poem that she claims roughly 80 fifth-grade students recited for their promotion ceremony (like graduation) at a school near Raleigh. Glenn Beck Reads 5th Grade We Learn More With Common Core Poem Classroom (Photo: Shutterstock) The poem does not, as some might expect, celebrate school being done for the year, friendship, memories, or anything of the like. Instead, it praises the virtues of the...

Niger Innis, Chief Strategist for TheTeaParty.net, gave a powerful speech at the Audit the IRS rally on June 19th in which he stated that the Tea Party movement is the modern day Civil Rights movement.

INDIANAPOLIS – Common Core hasn’t been fully implemented yet, but it’s already making it easier for teachers to inject their political preferences into their lesson plans. That’s the case in Indianapolis’ Cathedral High School, where English teacher Melinda Bundy ... “I didn’t want to teach the Constitution, I didn’t want to teach the Declaration of Independence,” ... teachers who use their classrooms to promote (usually) left-wing political causes. But under Common Core, those activist teachers will be able to excuse their behavior by simply saying, “Common Core made me do it.” Indiana lawmakers have prudently hit the “pause” button on...

Doug Short at Advisor Perspectives has a pair of interesting reports on price inflation as measured by the CPE and PCI. Please consider PCE Price Index Update: Sorry Fed, The Disinflationary Trend Continues. The latest Headline PCE price index year-over-year (YoY) rate of 0.74% is a decrease from last month's adjusted 1.01%. The Core PCE index of 1.05% is decrease from the previous month's adjusted 1.17%. It is the lowest Core PCE ever recorded; the previous all-time low was 1.06% in March 1963, fifty years ago. The continuing disinflationary trend in core PCE (the blue line in the charts below)...

Why does the U.S. Constitution make no mention of education? Because the Founding Fathers understood that the education of children must be at the local level. We now stand at the edge of a cliff as the federal Common Core State Standards continues its march across the country. How did we get here? In 2009, the U.S. Department of Education blackmailed the states with stimulus money in the form of Race to the Top (RTTT) grants. If states wanted to get out from under No Child Left Behind, and wanted more funding they had to agree to adopt the Common...

Common Core is an educational curriculum being forced upon the states by the Obama administration, which is scheduled to be mostly implemented this year in the 45 states that have adopted it. Common Core eliminates local control over K-12 curriculum in math and English, instead imposing a one-size-fits-all, top-down curriculum that will also apply to private schools and homeschoolers. Common Core was has been promoted in a manner that sounds good and commendable – “States working together to create national standards for education… standards that are designed to be robust and relevant in the real world.” Common Core describes itself...

Michigan legislators are working to put the brakes on Common Core and restore authority over what is taught in Michigan classrooms to state policymakers, local school leaders, and—most importantly—teachers and parents. As the Washington Times reports, “The state House on Wednesday passed an amendment, attached to the Education Department budget, that prohibits any funding for the controversial Common Core system.”