COMMON CORE DUMB DOWN

MAINE GOVERNOR EXECUTIVE ORDER AGAINST COMMON CORE

Governor Paul LePage of Maine issued an executive order on September 4, 2013 against Common Core.
Full text below unedited (with bold print ours for emphasis) from
http://www.maine.gov/tools/whatsnew/index.phptopic=Gov_Executive_Orders&id=592129&v=article2011:

"An Order Regarding Protection of Local 

Education Control and Student Privacy Rights"

September 4, 2013

2013-006

AN ORDER REGARDING PROTECTION OF LOCAL EDUCATION CONTROL AND STUDENT PRIVACY RIGHTS

WHEREAS, Under Maine law, the state’s ultimate goal with regard to its schools is that they will “enable today’s students to gain the knowledge and skills necessary for postsecondary education, career, citizenship and military”; and

WHEREAS, rigorous state standards detailing expected learning outcomes for students are essential if the state is to meet that goal; and

WHEREAS, The adoption of state standards for learning outcomes should be done in an open, transparent way that includes ample opportunity for public review and comment, and

WHEREAS, The federal government has no constitutional authority to set learning standards in Maine or any other state, nor determine how children in the State of Maine or any other state will be educated; and

WHEREAS, The Maine Constitution specifically grants to local governments responsibility for “the support and maintenance of public schools”; and

WHEREAS, It is therefore the right of local school units, not the state, to develop and or adopt curricula and instructional approaches consistent with state learning standards; and

WHEREAS, The protection of student and family privacy is a fundamental right of all Maine people;

NOW, THEREFORE, I, Paul R. LePage, Governor of the State of Maine, hereby order as follows:

That the Department of Education shall not adopt any educational standards, curricula or instructional approaches that may be mandated by the federal government.
That the Department of Education shall not apply for any federal grant that requires, as a condition of application, the adoption of any federally-developed standards, curricula or instructional approaches.

That, consistent with state statute, the Department of Education may provide guidance and technical assistance to schools, but may not require the adoption of specific curricula or instructional approaches.

That any amending of Maine’s Learning Results standards must be done through a transparent public rulemaking process that allows Maine people ample time and opportunity to review proposed changes and provide feedback.

Specifically, the Department of Education shall ensure that any amendment to the Learning Results be posted for public review and comment for at least 60 days. Any comments received during this notice period shall be made public prior to final adoption of any changes.

That the collection of student data by school districts and the state Department of Education must be done in a manner consistent with state and federal laws intended to protect student privacy. No personally identifiable data on students and/or their families’ religion, political party affiliation, psychometric data, biometric information, and/or voting history shall be collected, tracked, housed, reported or shared with the federal government, nor provided to private vendors for the purposes of marketing or business development.

The effective date of the Executive Order is September 4, 2013.

COMMON CORE: AN ASSAULT ON EDUCATION

From the Arizona Daily Independent at
http://www.arizonadailyindependent.com/2013/10/06/common-core-as-assault-on-american-education/, is their article reprinted in full below (with bold print ours for emphasis):

"Common core: As assault on American education", which reveals the socialist and deliberate "dumbing down" of students:

How can so many well educated representatives, charged with caring for and tending over the best interests of the children of Arizona and the future of our State be so wrong? The public outrage over what Common Core represents is growing. I would like to know if you plan to continue to press this, in spite of its clear assault on the Arizona Constitution and the Constitution of the United States of America?

The Common Core educational program being pushed onto school districts nationwide and after seeing the content and methodology the wrapper is off the package; it is indeed pure indoctrination of children into the New-World Order. Like the preponderant majority of programs and “change” introduced by Obama and his socialist minions, Common Core is explained away and packaged for quick sale before anyone really has a chance to read the contents.

In much the same way “Obamacare” is now repackaged as the Affordable Health Care Act, and it was pushed onto the American public with the famous line, “We have to pass it first before you get a chance to see what’s in it.”

Common Core is yet another such program, and evidence that the US Department of Indoctrination (AKA US Department of Education) should be eliminated. Arizona can do much better than continue to accept the garbage that comes from the federal bureaucracy. I doubt seriously thoughtful parents would agree to an educational program if they were told it contained teachings about the “population police” or “child removal from family” or teaching children how to create phony but believable I.D. cards to hide their true personal identity so they may be allowed to live.

Parents in states that have examined this New-Age agenda for indoctrination of children are now screaming, but Superintendents of Education at the state level, as well as at county and school district levels are pretending not to hear, all the while they make aggressive moves to rename Common Core to something more benign and acceptably confusing. And Arizona parents are awakening.

Common Core Curriculum is about control over children, their values and morals, about moving them into herd mentality versus developing critical thinking skills; Common Core Curriculum nationalizes education and removes oversight away from parents and local schools and school boards. Upon deeper examination, Common Core indoctrinates children in a socialist system with primary objectives in developing good common citizens with no exceptional traits, to become citizens of a larger community, a global community where national sovereignty no longer exists, loyalty is to the New-World Order, not to parents or the Constitution and Rule of Law and definitely not to Judeo-Christian teachings and values.

States and citizens (parents) are beginning to fight back, and this actually scares many elected officials who already have accepted large dollar amounts to implement this diabolical program. Many elected officials have the audacity to stand in front of the electorate and lie about the intent and purpose of this agenda building program, and the people are learning they have been lied to and just how badly. How long will Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction John Huppenthal stand by Common Core?

Article offered for additional reference.

Rotten to the Common Core

By Joan Swirsky
In July, the state of New York announced the results of its first tests based on the Common Core: The region hasn’t been this battered since Superstorm Sandy. Just 26 percent of students in third through eighth grade passed the English exam, and only 30 percent passed the math test. In one Harlem school , just seven percent of students received passing scores in English, and 10 percent in math. We’ve gone from No Child Left Behind to Well-Just-About-Every-Child-Left-Behind …progress of a kind. If ‘learned helplessness’ is the Common Core’s goal, it’s a stunning success.” Businessman George Ball.

Indeed, the tests based on the new Common Core (CC) curriculum horrified both parents and educators in New York State, as they are sure to do in the 45 other states that have accepted these new federal-education standards.

Yet in the very definition of a clueless response to the disastrous test results, NY State Education Commissioner John B. King, Jr. said that “these proficiency scores do not reflect a drop in performance, but rather a raising of standards to reflect college and career readiness in the 21st century.” Nice try, Mr. King. Go back to sleep.

How did this happen? Here’s a little history. When President George W. Bush introduced No Child Left Behind, liberals and teachers’ unions went crazy. How dare any program actually measure the effectiveness of classroom teachers or, worse, hold them accountable for decade after decade of failure? How dare that same program document the great
number of students allowed to progress through grade after grade in spite of jaw-dropping deficits in math and literacy?

Isn’t it wrongheaded, critics asked, to ‘teach to the test’ instead of giving students better skills and deeper knowledge? As if testing skills and knowledge is a bad thing!

Of course the “evolved” progressives and educrats among us decided to contrive a better mousetrap for improving the devolving state of American public-school education and they called their brainchild Common Core, a program that was formally adopted by the federal government in 2010 and by NY State in 2011. Other contributors to this dumbed-down excuse for education included members of the leftist Aspen Institute which was founded in 1950 to, among other things, “define a good society.”

Common Core has a nice ring, doesn’t it, suggesting that we’re all in this together and we all believe in education that includes America’s “core” values?

Don’t be fooled. As author and journalist Dean Kalahar writes, “Common Core…may look delicious, but before you take a bite out of the apple, it might be a good idea to know a razor is inside.” As Kalahar explains, “President Obama and Education Secretary [Arne] Duncan falsely said the Common Core standards were developed by the states and voluntarily adopted. CC was actually developed by an organization called Achieve, approved by the National Governors Association and funded by the Gates Foundation by at least $173 million dollars. The [cash-starved] states were bribed by $4.35 billion ‘Race to the Top’ dollars if they adopted the standards. Federal laws prohibit the U.S. Department of Education from prescribing any curriculum, but four billion is a big carrot – or is it a stick? Forty-six states and the District of Columbia have sold out… I mean ‘signed on.’”

According to journalist Nick Wills, the Common Core curriculum was implemented with virtually no empirical evidence of its value, and it was rushed into school systems without consulting – drum roll here – students, teachers and parents! Educatio nreformer Diane Ravitch says that the standards have been adopted “without any field test … imposed on the children of this nation despite the fact that no one has any idea how they will affect students, teachers, or schools.”

This takes on a certain grotesque logic when, according to businessman George Ball, you realize that in “the 60-person work group that developed the curriculum, there was not one practicing teacher! David Coleman, chief architect of the Common Core curriculum, now heads the College Board. That’s worrisome, and so is Coleman’s background as a consultant at McKinsey & Co., the firm that so ably advised Kmart, Enron, Swissair and Global Crossing.”

But so irresponsible were our educators and so avaricious to feed at the federal trough that they bought the whole package without even a sneak-peek at its contents.

What did they buy? Kalahar states that “for all intents and purposes, Common Core is nationalized education. History has shown that state-run information control, which begins with education, has always led to disastrous results, [for example] the USSR, Germany, and Cuba.

“The foundational philosophy of Common Core,” Kalahar adds, “is to create students ready for social action so they can force a social-justice agenda.” According to Wall St. Journal writer David Feith: “Common Core is about an obsession with race, class, gender, and sexuality as the forces of history and political identity…nationalizing education via Common Core is about promoting an agenda of anti-capitalism, sustainability, white guilt, global citizenship, self-esteem, affective math, and culture-sensitive spelling and language. This is done in the name of consciousness raising, moral relativity, fairness, diversity, and multiculturalism.”

Again, with zero input from students, teachers and parents – and zero knowledge by any parents about what is going on in their children’s classrooms!

For instance, did you know that the people who bleat most loudly about transparency – in this case those in Obama’s U.S. Dept. of Education – rewrote federal privacy laws in 2012 allowing the powers-that be to share your child’s academic record with virtually anyone? Now states are starting to combine student test scores, discipline history, medical records, nicknames, religion, political affiliation, addresses, extracurricular activities, fingerprints, iris scans, DNA, blood type, religion, family income, bus stop schedules and psychological evaluations into a private database called in Bloom.

“The federal government is acquiring a massive amount of data that can be sold to the highest bidders,” says Carole Hornsby Haynes, Ph.D., a curriculum specialist and writer.
“This is an invasion of student and family privacy and a violation of our 4th Amendment rights. The education-technology buzzards are circling overhead and, having smelled the strong scent of money, are salivating at the thought of making billions from this new goldmine.”

Did the principal of your child’s school let you know about this gross – and I believe, unconstitutional – invasion of privacy? Did your child’s teacher? Did the superintendent?

Did the School Board? No? Is that alone not an indefensible breach of trust and a further reason to reject this insidious Trojan Horse into American education?

Journalist and author Michelle Malkin calls Common Core “the stealthy federal takeover of school curriculum and standards across the country.” She explains that for decades, “collectivist agitators in our schools have chipped away at academic excellence in the name of fairness, diversity and social justice. [They] denounced Western civilization requirements, the Founding Fathers and the Great Books as racist. They attacked traditional grammar classes as irrelevant in modern life. They deemed ability grouping of students (tracking) bad for self-esteem. They replaced time-tested rote techniques and standard algorithms with fuzzy math, inventive spelling and multicultural claptrap.”

Malkin says that independent members of the expert panel in charge of validating the standards refute the claim that Common Core standards are superior. “Stanford University professor James Milgram, the only mathematician on the validation panel, concluded that the Common Core math scheme would place American students two years behind their peers in other high-achieving countries. In protest, Milgram refused to sign off on the standards. He’s not alone.” Professor Jonathan Goodman of New York University found that the Common Core math standards imposed “significantly lower expectations with respect to algebra and geometry than the published standards of other countries.”

And Ze’ev Wurman, a prominent software architect and longtime math advisory expert in California and Washington, D.C., said that “Common Core marks the cessation of educational standards improvement in the United States. No state has any reason left to aspire for first-rate standards, as all states will be judged by the same mediocre national benchmark enforced by the federal government.”

Journalist Cheryl Carpenter Klimek says that, “We’ve all been taught that 2+1=3, but under Common Core the answer could be 4, or pretty much any number you want to offer – as long as you can explain how you calculated the problem….” She cites a video of a Chicago teacher, Amanda August, explaining the, ahem, logic of this Common Core policy: “Even if they said, ’3 x 4 was 11,’ if they were able to explain their reasoning and explain how they came up with their answer really in, umm, words and oral explanation, and they showed it in the picture but they just got the final number wrong, we’re really more focusing on the how.”

Writer Tabitha Korol has pored over the textbooks used in the CC curriculum. Prentiss Hall’s “World History,” currently used in Brevard Country, Florida, devotes a 72-page chapter to Islam and only small paragraphs about Judaism and Christianity which are embedded in other chapters. Multiple editions of Houghton Mifflin’s “Across the Centuries” were found to contain Islamic preaching. And Pearson, the world’s leading pre-K-20 educational publishing company, is “dedicated to working with educators to change the way America thinks.”

“With whose approval?” Korol asks. Indeed!

In “Contemporary Human Geography 2e,” Korol found mention of “the Five Pillars of Islam, the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism, but not the values and righteous ethics of the Ten Commandments of Judaism and Christianity. In “Human Geography,”Korol found that “two of the topics posed the acceptability of murdering Jews, but for different reasons and judged by different circumstances. The superintendent of schools in one of the districts said he didn’t find that offensive…”

“Not only have they removed classes in civics, history, our nation’s foundation and traditional values,” Korol states, “but they have ensured the erasure by discontinuing cursive writing from the curriculum, the same script used for our original official documents, including the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, to make them indecipherable and insignificant. Gone are the studies in economics, needed for creative, entrepreneurial job opportunities, the country’s growth, and the arts, a reflection of the culture. How different is this from the book burning events of Nazism and other conquering tyrannical regimes?

“Further, the students will suffer a 60 percent cut in reading classic literature, poetry and drama, including the works of Charles Dickens, Edith Wharton, and Mark Twain, and the introduction of Algebra-1 and, by extension, advanced math will be delayed. From this information alone, it appears that the next generation is destined to become the drones of a worker society, not the citizens of an exceptional nation.”

Korol says that the Common Core textbooks “omit essential data and provide indoctrinating narratives that devalue Israel, Judaism and Christianity in favor of Islam.”

For instance, in Albany, New York, a high school English teacher used a Common Core textbook for her students’ assignment, which was to watch old Nazi propaganda films and justify to the Kommandant portrayed by the teacher) why the Jews should be murdered. And a teacher in Brentwood, Tennessee, asked her students if it was acceptable for Palestinians to kill Jewish children, based upon Israel’s occupation of “Palestine.”

In yet another CC textbook, Korol says, “two spellings are given for the Arab capitals of Mecca and Medina, but Jerusalem, the Jewish capital in Israel for three millennia since the days of David, is absent!

Similarly, the text mentions Muslim mosque designs, Christian churches and church architecture, Hindu temples, Buddhist and Shinto Pagodas, and Baha’i Temples, but not one mention of the various Jewish synagogue creations that reflected the architecture of their host cultures over the centuries.”

This is the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Korol and Malkin document their findings exhaustively and extensively, as do others who have made it their business to research the astoundingly racist – and of course leftist – curriculum, which is so replete with omissions, mistakes and distortions that it insures a one-size-fits-all population of astounding ignorance and deeply-embedded prejudice. Or, as Will Fitzhugh, publisher of The Concord Review has said: “The Common Core curriculum …is enabling students to be ignoramuses.”

Journalist and author Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh provides additional examples of the vile indoctrination the Common Core inflicts on students. She cites the development of a first-grade Democracy Plan to help people in need. “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.”

“In the same series of books,” Paugh adds, “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.”

Homework activities, she says, 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.”

By third grade, Paugh explains, teachers must “measure attitudes, beliefs, and dispositions,” noting on the Student Observation Form whether “growth and change in individual student’s behavior and attitudes is observed. 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.” Not incidentally, as a dangerous companion program to Common Core, the American Library Association is now teaching librarians how to push Islam. As part of a National Endowment for the Humanities program funded by $150 million of our taxpayer dollars, 25 books and a DVD are being provided to 800 public libraries – is your library included? – but no books on Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc.

The good news is that all over the country more and more people are becoming aware of the totalitarian nature of the Common Core curriculum and fighting back. Malkin lists grassroots parents groups and Tea Party groups in Massachusetts, Georgia, Utah, Texas, Indiana, Alabama, Florida, Ohio, South Carolina, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and nearly a dozen other states that are now educating themselves and their state legislatures about “the centralized education racket.”

In addition, the Indiana state senate passed legislation to halt Common Core implementation and similar legislation is moving through the Alabama state legislature.

And a few weeks ago, Governor Rick Scott of Florida held an education summit for education, business and political leaders on Common Core. Writing of the summit, Laura Rambeau Lee says: “The primary objection is that it is taking the control of our children’s education away from the parents, teachers, and local, even state, departments of education.” For instance, she adds, “on a nationwide scale, every teacher in every second grade class will be doing the same assignment on the same day of the same week. Teachers are no longer responsible for lesson plans. They are given the specific assignments and are teaching them to their students. If a student does not understand he or she will be out of luck, because tomorrow it is on to the next assignment. There is no opportunity to help the students who do not ‘get it.’ They will become frustrated and begin to have behavior problems and hate school. Many parents are already experiencing these problems with their children.”

Additionally, “What is the correct answer? All I know is it is not ‘B.’ Parents will not understand the assignment sufficiently to help their child and the child will begin to believe their teacher knows more than their parents.”

Rambeau Lee exhorts every parent to demand to see his or her child’s assignments. She says there are anti-Common Core Facebook pages for every state, and links to other education websites on her blog, Right-Reason.com (under the education tab).

David Bloomfield, professor of Education, Law and Policy at Brooklyn College, describes the defensiveness, excuses and rationalizations we’ve started to hear from the educational establishment this way: “The amount of spin is directly proportional to the size of the screw-up.”