Free Republic

MADISON –Nearly three years after state Superintendent Tony Evers signed off on implementing the Common Core State Standards, the Assembly and Senate committees on education got around to holding a public hearing to get the facts on the changes in Wisconsin classrooms. The room was packed Wednesday, mostly made up of ‘stop Common Core’ advocates with signs and red T-shirts. There was no mixing up these Common Core opponents with the suit-wearing government bureaucrats and experts asked to testify. Some attendees were shipped down the hall to an overflow room to watch the hearing. The showing at the Capitol could...

MADISON – Call it a quiet controversy. But there are a lot of people who don’t much care for Common Core State Standards. Opposition to the K-12 academic benchmarks that some conservatives have described as Big Brother education has swept the nation, and there is a growing core of Common Core combatants in the Badger State. They just don’t seem to get a lot of attention. Several tea party groups, however, plan to be front and center at 10 a.m. Wednesday in room 411 of the Capitol for an informational hearing on Wisconsin’s implementation of the Common Core. The joint...

On the heels of news that the Obama administration Department of Justice was spying on reporters at the Associated Press, Monday brought the startling disclosure by the Washington Post that the DOJ had also targeted Fox reporter James Rosen for surveillance in an effort to plug up leaks. Additionally, the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza obtained the full application for a search warrant of Rosen’s personal email account, in which the DOJ accused him of being “an aider and abettor and/or co-conspirator.” As Lizza put it, “Rosen was not charged with any crime, but it is unprecedented for the government, in...

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...

A North Carolina teacher is brain-washing students telling them Republican policies are hurting schools.EAG News reported: It appears that one North Carolina teacher is getting into the spirit of the new Common Core learning standards that promote the use of “informational” texts in the classroom. According to the StopCommonCoreNC.com, a fourth-grade teacher with Henderson County Public Schools gave students a brief reading assignment, titled “Raleigh’s Educational Plan.”(continued)

A fourth-grade student in Henderson County (corrected since original post) received the following worksheet, which qualifies as an “informational text” under the Common Core State Standards:

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...

A great deal has been written and spoken about Common Core, but it is worth rehearsing the outlines again. Common Core is a set of math and English standards developed largely with Gates Foundation money and pushed by the Obama administration and the National Governors Association. The standards define what every schoolchild should learn each year, from first grade through twelfth, and the package includes teacher evaluations tied to federally funded tests designed to ensure that schools teach to Common Core.

Indiana’s new Governor Mike Pence has signed in to law a bill that will “pause’’ the state’s involvement in the nationwide Common Core education agenda. That fact that this is happening in Indiana has some very specific political significance, while the fact that it is happening at all has broad ramifications. Before getting in to the meaning of Pence’s maneuver, consider some facts about Common Core. Officially named the “Common Core State Standards Initiative,” the agenda is not, itself, about curriculum mandates. It is a set of academic standards that students in the various grade levels are expected to achieve,...

Prepare ye the way of the Common Core. And then the Word will be made Fed. And Obama will dwell amongst us forever. Amen. -- From the Book of Common Core  Parent Led Reform, in collaboration with Truth in American Education, hosted a second rally via Twitter Thursday May 2nd to stop the implementation of Common Core standards. Common Core standards are national, top-down K-12 education ideology imposed by federal and state government. The #Stopcommoncore Twitter rally reached of nearly 9.8 million Twitter users. The traffic was so heavy and the complaints from liberals so loud that Twitter temporarily suspended...

Is President Obama taking-over our nation’s public schools? Is a United Nations agenda infiltrating America’s K-12 classrooms? No, not exactly. Not Yet. But the so-called “Common Core” public education agenda could be paving the way for some serious trouble.Here are a few basic assumptions that people are making about Common Core – along with the facts of the matter. Assumption # 1 : “Common Core” is a set of educational curriculum requirements being imposed on the states by the Obama Administration. Technically speaking, this is false. “Common Core,” whose official name is the “Common Core State Standards Initiative,” is not,...

May 3, 2013 N.C. high school student arrested for leaving shotgun in car gets scholarship to Liberty University By Katie LaPotin There is a silver lining in the story of the North Carolina high school student arrested Monday for accidentally leaving his shotgun in his locked car – he’s just earned himself a scholarship to his dream school, Liberty University.Cole Withrow was expelled from school and charged with a felony after school administrators overheard a private conversation between Withrow and his mother about the gun. According to a family friend, Withrow had gone skeet shooting the day before and forgot...

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.”

Generally, expert advisers counsel against teaching about the Holocaust by having students do exercises that re-create the experience. Role-play activities can reinforce negative views, stereotype group behavior and are pedagogically unsound, according to the Anti-Defamation League. Yet some teachers leading classes on the Shoah have used such techniques, including re-creating the experience of being transported in cattle cars by having students cram into a small space, or holding the better-known “blue eyes-brown eyes” activity, with the teacher giving fewer privileges to the students with brown eyes. Two weeks ago, a class at Santa Monica High School was asked to participate...

Private religious schools perform better than public schools, and public charter schools performed no better than regular public schools, according to a new study by William Jeynes, professor of education at California State University at Long Beach and senior fellow at the Witherspoon Institute at Princeton. Jeynes spoke Monday with The Christian Post about the study. He found that religious, mostly Christian, school students were a full year ahead of students who attend public and charter schools. The results of his research were recently published in vol. 87, issue 3 of the Peabody Journal of Education in an article titled,...

Prepare ye the way of the Common Core. And then the Word will be made Fed. And Obama will dwell amongst us forever. Amen. -- From the Book of Common Core   Prepare for the final federalization of primary education in the USA- hereafter known as Common Core- and don’t worry so much about relics written by old, white men like the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. The Tenth Amendment only helps ensure local control of those things like education policy. It only ensures that we have a big, diverse, vibrant country full of lots of...

Vlad, the Impaler must be dancing in his grave as the beast known as the Federal Education Department makes the United States into Transylvania West by turning our public school system into its own, blood-sucking, Communist training camp! Orwellian standards, end runs around local school boards and ruination of states’ rights are all part of the Obama administration’s dangerous Common Core initiative to strip our land of freedom. Dr. Alison Rampersad, a Co-Chair of Eye on U.S. Education, gave a Florida workshop a frightening heads up on what really is in Common Core, slated to be a done deal within...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK) “This isn’t about me wanting to take your kids, and this isn’t even about whether children are property. This is about whether we as a society, expressing our collective will through our public institutions, including our government, have a right to impinge on individual freedoms in order to advance a common good....

Exxon employs thousands of engineers and geologists. Naturally, it is concerned about the quality of the U.S. educational system. Like many large corporations, Exxon believes the Obama-Jeb Bush -Bill Gates-backed Common Core scheme will improve education. Reality check: This top-down federalization of academic standards and testing will do just the opposite not only for math education, but across the pedagogical board. Today, Exxon aired pro-Common Core ads during the Masters golf tournament. Informed parents, activists, and educators gave the edu-propaganda a big, fat “F.”

Students in some Albany High School English classes were asked to participate in the unthinkable this week as part of a persuasive writing assignment. The objective? Prove why Jews are evil and convince the teacher of their loyalty to the Third Reich in five paragraphs or less. “You must argue that Jews are evil, and use solid rationale from government propaganda to convince me of your loyalty to the Third Reich!” read the description on the assignment, which the school superintendent said reflects the kind of sophisticated writing expected of students under the new Common Core standards and was meant...

‘I Am Willing to Give Up Some of My Constitutional Rights…to Be Safer’ The words are written in crayon, in the haphazard bumpiness of a child's scrawl. "I am willing to give up some of my constitutional rights in order to be safer or more secure." They're the words that Florida father Aaron Harvey was stunned to find his fourth-grade son had written, after a lesson in school about the Constitution. Florida 4th Grader Brings Home Paper That Says, I Am Willing to Give Up Some of My Constitutional Rights in Order to Be Safer...paper Aaron Harvey's son wrote as...

A mother at a Wisconsin public school said her daughter’s eighth grade class was assigned a worksheet with some eyebrow-raising definitions for “conservatism” and “liberalism.” Conservatism, it stated in part, believes in “preserving traditional moral values by restricting personal freedoms” while liberalism is for “equality and personal freedom for everyone.” “This is indoctrination,” Tamra Varebrook, a Republican activist in Racine, Wis., told TheBlaze on Thursday after her 13-year-old daughter showed her the crossword-style vocabulary sheet from Union Grove Elementary School earlier this week. Varebrook first talked about the assignment with the news arm of the conservative Education Action Group. Varebrook...

Thanks to grass-roots activism, limited-government think tanks, whistle-blowing educators and bloggers, vigilant local and state legislators, and tireless parents committed to protecting their children, the truth about federalized Common Core standards is spreading.… Some stalwart conservatives inside the RNC get it. They’re bucking the mooooooderate Republican line on Common Core and have put forth a resolution being considered this afternoon at the RNC spring meeting. I heard from one of the co-sponsors of the resolution today, who believes it will pass. I’ll update with developments. Here’s the full text of the resolution, via Shane Vander Hart at Truth in American...

Continuing their commitment to controlling global population growth through artificial contraception, sterilization, and abortion initiatives, Microsoft founder and philanthropist, Bill Gates and his wife, Melinda, a self-described “practicing” Catholic, are now attempting to control the curriculum of the nation’s public schools. Subsidizing the Common Core State Standards in English language arts and mathematics, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has committed more than $76 million to support teachers in implementing the Common Core—a standardized national curriculum.   This, on top of the tens of millions they have already awarded to the National Governor’s Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers...

New national standards prod schools to return to content-based education.The biggest new thing in American public education these days is a two-volume, 230-page, written-by-committee document called the Common Core State Standards. Forty-five states have pledged to the federal government that they will adopt the standards—which specify the math and English skills that students must attain in each grade from kindergarten to the end of high school—within the next several years. Some of these states genuinely believe that doing so will make more of their students ready for college and careers. Others are on board primarily because the Obama administration has...

In the message he issued along with his budget proposal on Wednesday morning, President Barack Obama said he wants to see 4-year-old children in the United States enrolled in public schools. Obama said America needs to start enrolling 4-year-olds to make sure the children are “better prepared for the demands of the global economy” and to help parents save on "child-care costs." After saying the United States needs to “equip our citizens with the skills and training” to fill jobs in manufacturing,energy and infrastructure,Obama said,“And that has to start at the earliest possible age.”

The father of a Connecticut child is furious after discovering that his son’s school is teaching students that Americans don’t have a Second Amendment right to bear arms. “I am appalled,” said Steven Boibeaux, of Bristol. “It sounds to me like they are trying to indoctrinate our kids.” Boibeaux’s son is an eighth grader at Northeast Middle School. On Monday his social studies teacher gave students a worksheet titled, ‘The Second Amendment Today.’ “The courts have consistently determined that the Second Amendment does not ensure each individual the right to bear arms,” the worksheet states. “The courts have never found...

"State senators ask about multi-media presentation criticizing parents"Members of the Texas Senate Committee on Education have asked representatives of the controversial “curriculum management system” called CSCOPE to explain why they targeted private citizens who have been critical of the program in a multi-media presentation delivered to superintendents and teachers in the state. The Texas attorney general previously found that CSCOPE is a public entity, despite its organization as a non-profit, since it is composed of government-funded and government-organized Education Service Centers. The centers previously held microfilm and videos for lease by classroom personnel around the state, and were slated to...

I just heard another Republican politico, a state senator here in Georgia, at a meeting, claim that Common Core is not a federalized education curriculum, but a “state-led” education reform initiative. He could have been reading from a press release sent by the Obama Department of Education. In reality, Common Core was attached to millions of dollars in stimulus funds that were dangled by the feds before the states in a contest called “Race to the Top” during the 2009 economic crisis. The attached Common Core standards were not even written when states signed up. Writing the standards and attached...

The new battle-cry to save a disappearing Republic should begin with the words: “Set our children free”. ...Millions of parents with school-age children will never know their children have been captured and led away. The name of the program set up for the kidnap of all time is so innocent sounding: Common Core. But in typical Marxist fashion, the name can be morphed into a myriad of others when it becomes expedient to keep parents in the dark.... Middlemen advocates in the progressive infrastructure are now trying to palm off the universal standards of Common Core as a “state-led” initiative....

As a greater level of scrutiny is being placed on the controversial curriculum systems CSCOPE (in Texas) and Common Core Standards (nationwide), concerned parents spoke to TheBlaze about their troubling experiences, revealing that not even home-schooling is beyond the reach of these encroaching systems. Home-schooling not beyond the reach of Common Core?  Keven Card, a former Marine from Houston who has home-schooled his children for the last six years, thought his family was safe from the reach of Common Core, but soon learned otherwise. As noted on his blog, two years ago Pearson Education, which is linked to Common Core, acquired Texas...

Four years ago Glenn talked about the machine progressives were building. The new framework that once ready, they would be able to turn on and fundamentally transform America. What does Glenn feel is THE most important piece of that machinery? Common Core. Using education to indoctrinate the youth has been embedded into the progressive agenda, with both the GOP and Democrats championing the terrifying legislation. “I don’t know of a time that I have really truly called and put a plea out and sent an SOS out,” Glenn explained at the beginning of radio’s second hour today. “This has already...

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Glenn has spent a lot of time over the past few weeks exposing some of the education initiatives in states across the country that are indoctrinating kids into the radical progressive agenda. Today, Glenn discussed an issue tied into Common Core that many people aren’t aware of: data mining.“We cover many important stories and topics on this program, but I don’t think any could be more important than what we are covering tonight: the progressive takeover of America’s schools,” Glenn said.Glenn spent the opening minutes of the monologue reviewing the scary pieces of legislation that have allowed the government access...

A Texas mom is furious after discovering that her son’s school is teaching students that the United States is partly to blame for the 9/11 terrorist attacks that claimed the lives of nearly 3,000 people. Kara Sands, of Corpus Christi, Texas, took to her Facebook and posted photos of the test administered by Flour Bluff Intermediate School. The test reportedly covered content in a video fifth-grade students watched in class. Of all the questions about the 9/11 attacks, Sands was most disturbed by question three:

CORPUS CHRISTI -- Many parents check their children's school work to make sure they're getting good grades, but how often to you check the content of those lessons? One mother of a child in Flour Bluff ISD says when she did, she was shocked that lesson taught her son to blame the United States for the 9/11 attacks. Kara Sands posted the test on her facebook page and it began to spread like wildfire. The test covers content watched on a video in class. What bothered her most is question #3 on the test. It asks why the U.S. may...

JUST SAY NO!Yesterday, Glenn Beck and his team at The Blaze TV aired a terrific program with teachers and activists exposing some of the basic myths and failures of the Common Core racket (click on the link and be sure to sign up. Glenn’s network is doing invaluable, forward-thinking work). It was heartening to see the trailblazers receive the time and attention tthey deserve. And it’s just the tip of the educational iceberg.My column today delves further into the creepy Fed Ed data-mining racket. Don’t just sit there. Get involved. As always, see the links and resources at the end...

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle” ― Sun Tzu, The Art of War In the preceding “Know Thy Enemy” series - Prologue, I Education, II Media and III Celebrity Culture  - I’ve identified three sources which have exposed America to a very dangerous disease. The systemic cause is a virus that manifests itself as a...

Conservatives are in an uproar over Common Core, an educational curriculum being forced upon the states by the Obama administration, which is scheduled to be mostly implemented this year in the 46 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. Superficially, it sounds good. It creates universal standards that supposedly educate all children for college. But along with the universal standards come a myriad of problems, which the administrators of Common Core are disingenuously denying. The...

(This is the fourth installment of a continuing series on nationalized academic standards known as the “Common Core.�)While many Americans worry about government drones in the sky spying on our private lives, Washington meddlers are already on the ground and in our schools gathering intimate data on children and families.Say goodbye to your children’s privacy. Say hello to an unprecedented nationwide student tracking system, whose data will apparently be sold by government officials to the highest bidders. It’s yet another encroachment of centralized education bureaucrats on local control and parental rights under the banner of “Common Core.�As the American...

Texas is a right-minded red state, where patriotism is still a virtue and political correctness is out of vogue. So how on earth have left-wing educators in public classrooms been allowed to instruct Lone Star students to dress in Islamic garb, call the 9/11 jihadists "freedom fighters" and treat the Boston Tea Party participants as "terrorists"? Here's the dirty little secret: Despite the best efforts of vigilant parents, teachers and administrators committed to academic excellence, progressive activists reign supreme in government schools. That's because curriculum is king. The liberal monopoly on the modern textbook/curricular market remains unchallenged after a half-century....

MONTGOMERY, Alabama -- State Republicans are pushing back against national curriculum standards with proposed legislation that would repeal part of the state's existing curriculum and seek to block federal policy makers from student and teacher data. Identical bills introduced last week in the House and Senate would overturn the State Board of Education’s adoption of Common Core State Standards developed by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers... State Republicans have criticized the standards as a precursor to a federal takeover of K-12 education since the Obama administration announced in 2009 that states competing for...

In recent years, the federal government has succeeded in expanding their control over health care, financial markets, the auto industry, the coal industry, and more. Now they have gained greater control over our nation’s public school systems with a program that one Georgia lawmaker calls “No Child Left Behind on steroids.”

AUSTIN, Texas – Parents of school children across Texas now are gaining access to a previously secret public school curriculum, according to an announcement from a state lawmaker. The CSCOPE program, an online offering that until now has prohibited, under penalty of law, teachers from sharing the lessons with parents, stirred up controversy because of its various lessons – some that were taken offline after the questions arose. Among those issues were that the curriculum at one point taught the Boston Tea Party was an act of terrorism and Christians were cannibals, and forced students to draw a socialist flag...

California will no longer require eighth-graders to take algebra —a move that is line with the Common Core standards being adopted by most states, but that may leave students unprepared for college. Last month, California formally shifted to the Common Core mathematics standards, which recommend that students delay taking algebra if they aren’t ready for it. Previously, algebra class was a requirement for all eighth-graders in the state. The Common Core State Standards Initiative, which is sponsored by the National Governor’s Association, is an effort to unify diverse state education curricula. Forty-five other states and the District of Columbia have...

From a history teacher: I am anxiously awaiting the next installment in your Rotten to the Core series. As a history teacher, the Common Core Standards don’t have much of an impact on my teaching (yet – and to my understanding). The whole of this program seems to be shrouded in edu-speak and double talk (which are mostly the same). In addition to the Common Core, we were given an intro to another change coming to my district… and from what I’ve seen, it is spreading to districts across the country. The new model for teaching is Strategic Planning Strategies...

Please tell me if anyone has heard of this "junior classic" “Last spring, my 2nd-grade daughter came home with an extra assignment—a worksheet she hadn’t completed in class for a story called The Selkie Girl,” Jennifer Holladay writes in the Winter 2012-2013 issue of Rethinking Schools.” She brought the book home, too, and it was one I’d never seen before, a Junior Great Books anthology (Series 3, Book 1), published by the nonprofit Great Books Foundation.” “As we settled in, I asked my daughter to tell me about The Selkie Girl. Her rendition gave me pause, so I asked her...

(This is the second part of an ongoing series on federal "Common Core" education standards and the corruption of academic excellence.)The Washington, D.C., board of education earned widespread mockery this week when it proposed allowing high school students -- in the nation's own capital -- to skip a basic U.S. government course to graduate. But this is fiddlesticks compared to what the federal government is doing to eliminate American children's core knowledge base in English, language arts and history. Thanks to the "Common Core" regime, funded with President Obama's stimulus dollars and bolstered by duped Republican governors and business groups,...

Kindergarten has come a long way, baby — too far, some say. Way beyond the ABCs, crayons and building blocks, the city Department of Education now wants 4- and 5-year-olds to write “informative/explanatory reports” and demonstrate “algebraic thinking.” Children who barely know how to write the alphabet or add 2 and 2 are expected to write topic sentences and use diagrams to illustrate math equations.

The Common Core Standards are an educational reform movement initiated by the National Governors Assocation and intended to standardize the educational curricula of the states around a "coomon core" of knowledge required to function in modern society. Put that way, the initiative sounds fine, but as if often the case with educaitonal reforms, Common Core proponents have relied on bafflement and obfuscation to shut down inquiry by the paying public into the very political process of putting the initiative into action -- a process monetarily supported by private education corporations. Common Core tests (those used in Oklahoma were developed by...