Common Core: Public Education or Personal Enrichment?

Below is an excellent Op-Ed piece from Marianne Gasiecki of the Mansfield Tea Party on following the Common Core money trail that fuels the national push of a select few to control our children's minds through education. 

Highlighting Bill Gates & The Gates Foundation financial influence and corporate cronyism perverting education in our country, you will see Common Core has nothing to do with education of our children and everything to do with personal enrichment off of our children.

On a side note, this would be the same Bill Gates & Gates Foundation that has duped many conservatives into blindly supporting the nationwide push for Charter Schools - that fly under the Gates-funded Trojan Horse banner of "School Choice." 

From The Richland Source --

I have always been a firm believer of “follow the money.” Unfortunately, Common Core (CC) is no exception.

The state’s position has always been that every school district has the right to opt out of CC, but when considering that option, schools receive threatening letters from the Ohio Department of Education (ODE).

The latest threat is that schools will lose money if students opt out of the testing this fall. False. There is nothing in the Ohio Revised Code tying a child’s test to funding.

All this coercion makes sense when you learn that the ODE received $4.5 million, and the National Assoc. of State School Boards received $3.3 million from the Gates Foundation, for implementation of CC.

And that’s just a drop in the bucket. The Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Assoc., two D.C. based private organizations, received over $65 million and over $3 million, respectively, from the Gates Foundation, along with their D.C. based Partner Achieve Inc., which received over $9 million, in exchange for aiding the Obama Administration in their efforts to implement a one-size-fits-all, nationalization of education. So much for being “state led.”

Struggling states accepted Race to the Top and stimulus money in exchange for implementing a set of standards, sight unseen. The standards had yet to be developed.

Now we’ve seen them. The two most qualified members of the CC Validation Committee refused to sign off on them, stating they would put us years behind other countries in mathematics alone. Parents and students are struggling to understand the convoluted math homework, and teachers are spending more time testing and being assessed than they are teaching. Bill Gates hopes his “education stuff works...but we won’t know for probably a decade”. That’s a generation lost to an experiment.

So why is Bill Gates supporting this experiment on our children? Money.

Schools (the taxpayer) using computer-based, Common Core-aligned tests will now need to spend “a bunch of money — on Microsoft products.” Click here to read more.

Textbook publishers, like McGraw Hill and Pearson, are also making a fortune as taxpayers are forced to fund all new textbooks to align with CC. Pearson has purchased a bio-behavioral testing company so they can do more behavioral testing in the schools. Why is a textbook company getting into the bio-behavioral testing business? Think about it.

Our children have been reduced to nothing more than “human capital” in the game of “workforce development,” as privacy is continually violated and 400+ data points are gathered through the excessive online assessing and mandated use of technology in instruction.

Who benefits from this data? Big business. In the era of online data collection, Bill Gates is clearly excited about how the sharing of this information will make it easier for companies to market their products to your children when he said, “When the tests are aligned to the common standards, the curriculum will line up as well—and that will unleash powerful market forces…”

Who else benefits? Universities. The National Science Foundation (a federal agency) just awarded $4.8 million of our tax dollars to prominent research universities “aiming to build a massive repository for storing, sharing, and analyzing the information students generate when using digital learning tools.”

No one is opposed to standards, but CC has nothing to do with elevating the education of our children, and everything to do with elevating corporate cronyism off the backs of our children.

If people truly believe in putting our children first, then we should all be supporting the complete repeal of CC through Ohio House Bill 597.

Marianne Gasiecki, Mansfield

Why can't Ohio get rid of Common Core?

Art credit: fotosearch.com

A little over a month ago, Oklahoma got rid of Common Core. But legislation to get rid of Common Core in Ohio continues to languish in the statehouse. Why? Here’s a clue from July 16 in the Columbus Dispatch about Gov. Kasich, from a paragraph buried toward the end of the article:

Kasich spoke [on July 15] to more than 200 members of the Ashland Area, Bucyrus Area, Clear Fork Valley, Galion-Crestline and Richland Area chambers of commerce at Deer Ridge Golf Club south of Mansfield.

. . .

The governor also defended the Common Core, saying while the plan sets overall goals for educational achievement, local school boards must approve the curriculum to achieve those objectives. Common Core is a set of common standards for math and English/language arts.

Goals and common standards? Here is a stinging analysis of the “common standards” from Bruce Deitrick Price at American Thinker:

“Drop a precision part so it would deform a tiny bit and malfunction down the line.”  That’s practically an epitaph for the destructive results achieved by our elite educators throughout the 20^th century.

Great cunning was displayed in educational sabotage.  Typically, there is an optimal sequence in learning something, no matter if it's tennis, driving a car, typing, speaking French, or American history.  Disrupt that ideal sequence, teach things in a confusing way, and you will have poor results.

Consider reading.  The ideal sequence is that the child memorizes the alphabet, learns the sounds represented by each letter, and then learns to blend those sounds.  At that point, the child is reading.  This extraordinary skill was once routinely mastered in the first grade.  That was before saboteurs got to work.

The essence of their technique was to hide the alphabet and the sounds.  The child was kept busy doing the worst possible thing: memorizing words as diagrams.  This is a slow task, and hopeless.  English has several hundred thousand words, and many are remarkably similar: life, light, flight, lite, lifer, lit, fife, fifth, fight, fright.  Also, consider Dolch lists for the fifth or sixth grade.  The student is still illiterate at the age of 11 or 12.  Clearly, that was the plan. 

In arithmetic, the sabotage technique was equally obvious.  Again, the Education Establishment used relentless praise of a lie – in this case, that children would learn math more quickly if, at the elementary level, they studied a mix of easy and advanced concepts.  This makes as much sense as taking novice skiers up on the black-diamond slopes...which would make perfect sense if you were trying to kill kids.

New Math came along in the 1960s, and children were expected to learn matrices, statistics, Boolean algebra, set theory, base-8.  Stuff that was once taught in college now had to be taught in the second grade.  Only a saboteur would say so.  Twenty years later, Reform Math used similar gimmicks.  Children today are still bedeviled by weird and unnecessary complexities, now often ridiculed as Common Core Math.

In the teaching of general knowledge, our saboteurs were particularly ingenious.  They created what military people call interlocking fire.  Nothing survives.

Multiculturalism says don’t bother learning anything about your own culture.  Relevance says don’t bother learning anything about faraway cultures.  Self-esteem says don’t teach anything that some children won't be able to handle.  No Memorization says don’t ask a child to remember anything.  In case any little wisp of knowledge might still get through, Constructivism says that teachers should not teach.  In a sick way, all of this is genius.  From K to 12, schools have an array of reasons why they need not bother teaching.

Read the rest here.

# # #

Time to Defund Common Core; Contact Your U.S. Senator Now!

The left's feel good program to further indoctrinate our children through the education system, Common Core, is thankfully facing a growing opposition.

In Ohio, the Ohio State Board of Education has adopted Common Core and is now cajoling local school districts to accept these new standards.  Common Core turns traditional teaching on its' head and will cause enormous financial burdens on districts as they will need to purchase new text books specifically tailored to teach the new Common Core Standards.

To combat this effort in Ohio, Ohioans Against Common Core (OACC) has been doing great work and has recently held forums across the state in attempts to educate the public on this very dangerous indoctrination program.

To watch a short informative video on what Common Core Standards are, please click here.

As local activist groups across the U.S. try to battle Common Core Standards at the local level, Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) is taking the fight against Common Core to D.C. and is asking fellow Senators to co-sign a letter asking them to join his efforts to defund Common Core....

From Caffeinated Thoughts --

Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) is asking his colleagues to co-sign a letter asking the Senate Appropriations Committee that funds education to cut off all future funds that would allow the Obama administration to “cajole state’s” into participating in the Common Core State Standards and it’s assessments.

His office in an email sent late this afternoon document the steps the Obama administration has taken to push states to adopt the Common Core.

• Making adoption of Common Core a pre-requisite for a state even being able to compete for Race to the Top funds.

• Directly funding the two assessment consortia developing tests aligned to Common Core using Race to the Top funds.

• Assembling a panel to review the work of the two assessment consortia.

• Making implementation of Common Core or coordination with Common Core a funding priority for other, unrelated competitive grants administered by the Department of Education.

• Making participation in Common Core essentially a prerequisite for being awarded a waiver from the Department of requirements in the No Child Left Behind Act.

The email said, “This means no more Race to the Top funds in support of Common Core or the assessments aligned with Common Core and stopping further federal review of the assessments produced by the two consortiums. It also means that the Department could not penalize a state that chooses to leave Common Core by revoking its NCLB waiver. The deadline for senators to sign on this letter is April 25 so it can reach the subcommittee in time to be considered. “

Please contact your U.S. Senator immediately and ask them to sign on to Senator Grassley's letter to defund Common Core Standards. (Click to Read Letter)

In Ohio, please contact Senator Rob Portman and Senator Sherrod Brown....

Senator Rob Portman
PH #: (202)224-3353
Email: http://www.portman.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/contact?p=contact-form

Senator Sherrod Brown
PH #: (202)224-2315
Email: http://www.brown.senate.gov/contact/

To find contact information on your U.S. Senator please click here.

Constitution Day Celebration (Medina, OH)

Constitution Day Celebration

In an effort to energize and educate citizens about the Constitution and its importance, the Medina Tea Party Patriots are hosting a Constitution Day Celebration on Saturday, September 17th. We invite you to join us as we reclaim the truths and liberties that are found within this extraordinary document.

• What: Constitution Day Celebration
• Date: Saturday Sept. 17, 2011
• Time: 4pm - 6:30pm
• Location: Medina City Square (Map / Directions) (Parking Map Click here)

Speakers for the event include:

• Sheriff Richard Mack – One of Arizona’s renowned sheriffs who is a strong advocate of states' rights and individual freedoms (bio)
• Bill Federer – Nationally known author and historian who recently penned Change to Chains – The 6000 Year Quest for Control (bio)
• Dr. Michael Schwarz – Assistant professor of history at Ashland University and a fellow of the Ashbrook Center (bio)
• Chris Long – President of Ohio Christian Alliance who has been instrumental in getting the American Founding Documents Bill introduced in the Ohio Legislature (bio)
• Ken Hammontree – Historical reenactor who will be portraying Thomas Jefferson

Daniel Shy and the John Hancock Ad Hoc Band will be performing patriotic music. Other speakers and musical performers will be added…

On September 17, 1787, delegates gathered in Philadelphia for the last time to sign the Constitution. Their desire to “form a more perfect union” changed the course of history, putting the power of government into the hands of “We the People.”

What was a significant moment for our nation has sadly become an afterthought for many in our culture today. It seems Americans have forgotten the significance and meaning of the Constitution, which grants us freedom and liberty, and our elected officials have forsaken the very document our founders masterfully created.

What is a significant moment now is how the U.S. Constitution is under constant attack by the left.  It is important, now more than ever, that we as Americans, embrace and hold dear the the document protecting our God-given rights and assuring our freedoms & libertys as citizens of the United States.

Tea Party Patriots Adopt-a-School Program

“….in Order to form a more perfect Union,….”

 Written 223 years ago, those words changed the course of history, establishing the freedoms and rights Americans enjoy today. Yet, many of our schools have ignored teaching the meaning and significance of our nation’s founding documents. For this reason, Ohio Tea Patriot groups are launching an initiative to bring awareness to Constitution Day/Week, which begins September 17th, among parents, teachers and school districts.

Did you know?

Schools that receive federal funds MUST teach the Constitution.

In 2004, Congress passed the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2005 into Public Law 108-447. Section 111 of that law mandates that "each educational institution that receives federal funds for a fiscal year shall hold an educational program on the United States Constitution on September 17 of such year for the students….”  This joint resolution designated September 17th as “Constitution/Citizenship Day” and the week beginning September 17th and ending September 23rd of each year as “Constitution Week.”

Patriots across the country are concerned that students in the public schools are not being taught about our founding documents. Tea Party Patriots are mounting a national campaign for 2011 Constitution Week to pressure our public schools to comply with a law passed by Congress in 2004 requiring an educational program on the Constitution be taught in all public schools during Constitution Week (September 17-23).

Here is How it Works in Three Easy Steps:

1. “Adopt a School”
2. Send a series of 3 letters to the school board, superintendent, and/or principal, and local media in your community. One letter will be sent in May 2011, one in August, and one in September. Sample letters can be found at www.TeaPartyPatriots.org/constitution and can be personalized for use in your community.
3. Help Your School Implement a Program. Visit www.nccs.net or www.ConstitutionWeekUSA.com for Constitution Week materials, resources, and additional ideas.

If you find resistance from your school toward implementing the program, or need further information, please contact us at; clevelandteaparty@gmail.com.

We want our children and grand children to be taught the meaning and significance of the fundamental documents that created our incomparable nation.

Bill introduced to teach Founding Documents in Ohio Schools

Imagine that.... teaching the children in our schools about the Founding Documents of our country -- What a novel idea! 

From WMD --

COLUMBUS—House Majority Whip John Adams (R-Sidney) recently introduced legislation that will incorporate the study of historically significant government documents into the educational curriculum of Ohio students.

Specifically, House Bill 211 will require that the social studies curriculum for elementary and secondary students in grades 4-12 includes the study of the following:

• Declaration of Independence
• Northwest Ordinance
• Constitution of the United States (with emphasis on the Bill of Rights)
• Ohio Constitution

“We can’t expect our children to understand and defend the rights and freedoms the Founding Fathers intended for us—and that many people have died for—if they don’t have an understanding of how these documents led to the system of government we have today,” Adams said. “By giving these young people an understanding of our heritage, we are better preparing them to be active and productive citizens down the road.”

 

The study of these documents has recently been diminished in the standards and curricula developed by the Ohio Department of Education during the previous administration. If passed, the State Board of Education would be required to revise the standards and curricula to include the additional content.

For text of HB 211, click here.

Judicial Watch files Suit Against Maryland Community College for giving In-State Tuition break to Illegal Immigrants

From Judicial Watch --

Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, announced today that on Thursday, January 20, it filed a taxpayer lawsuit against the Board of Trustees of Maryland’s Montgomery College for unlawfully charging discounted “in county” tuition rates to students who graduate from Montgomery County public high schools, regardless of their place of residency or immigration status. The new lawsuit alleges Montgomery College’s tuition policy violates both Maryland and federal law and places a substantial financial burden on Montgomery County taxpayers who subsidize the cost of students attending the community college. Judicial Watch filed the lawsuit on behalf of Montgomery County taxpayers Michael Lee Philips, Patricia Fenati and David Drake in the Circuit Court for Montgomery County (Philips, et al. v. Board of Trustees of Montgomery College (V342882)).

According to Judicial Watch’s complaint:

Under federal law, unlawfully present aliens generally are ineligible for state or local public benefits, including post-secondary education benefits such as reduced tuition, unless a state has enacted a law affirmatively providing for such eligibility. The State of Maryland has never enacted a law affirmatively providing that unlawfully present aliens are eligible to receive reduced, in-county tuition at public institutions of higher education, including community colleges such as Montgomery College…

Pursuant to Maryland law, “Montgomery College is required to charge out-of-state tuition to any student who attends a community college in the State of Maryland and is not a resident of the State…”

Defendant Board's long-standing policy is causing substantial, pecuniary loss to taxpayers in Montgomery County and the State of Maryland. By providing reduced, in-county tuition to all students who graduate from Montgomery County public high schools, regardless of their residence or status as unlawfully present aliens, Montgomery College is failing to collect revenue that, by state and federal law, it is required to collect.

By law, the tuition paid by a student who attends community college is determined by a student’s place of residence. Students who are residents of the county or counties supporting the community college they attend are charged an in-county rate. Students who are residents of the State of Maryland, but reside outside the county or counties supporting the community college they attend are charged an instate rate. Students who reside outside the State of Maryland are charged an out-of-state rate.

However, Montgomery College has a long-standing policy of providing graduates of Montgomery County public high schools, including illegal aliens who unlawfully reside in the United States, the lowest “in county” tuition rate regardless of their place of residence. Montgomery College described this policy in financial statements for Fiscal Years 2007, 2008 and 2009: "[T]he Montgomery College policy is applicable to all persons, equally, and includes all citizens as well as undocumented aliens…" The tuition policy was formally adopted by Montgomery College’s Board of Trustees on November 15, 2010.

Between 2006 and 2009, Montgomery College failed to collect $5,870,852 in tuition fees due to its policy of unlawfully allowing a discounted “in county” tuition rate to illegal aliens and other “out of state” students.

The policy has been questioned by the College’s own auditors. Maryland State Delegate Pat McDonough first alerted Judicial Watch to this issue last year, prompting Judicial Watch to conduct an independent investigation, which led to this taxpayer lawsuit.

“Montgomery College’s funneling of tax dollars to tuition benefits for illegal aliens is against the law. The policy is especially egregious in this age of government budget crises,” stated Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “Our taxpayer clients hope the court will put a stop to Montgomery College’s policy of providing illegal perks at taxpayer expense.”

Education Revolution: Restoring America's Exceptionalism

American 15-year-olds rank 35th out of 57 countries in math and literacy, behind almost all industrialized nations! I don’t believe America should be 35th in anything.  It’s time to restore America’s Exceptionalism!

On Monday, January 24, Americans for Prosperity Ohio will co-host an exciting town hall in the greater Cleveland area with Fox News Commentator Juan Williams and national radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt!  Click here for a full list of sponsoring organizations.

You can register for this free-ticketed event HERE! 

Be a part of the revolution to restore America’s exceptionalism!  Hugh Hewitt and Juan Williams will be taking your town hall questions at The Education Revolution– Restoring American Exceptionalism Town Hall! 

The Education Revolution is not a partisan issue.

It’s an American issue –and our future depends on it!

Senator Scott Brown Slams Harvard for Continuing to Refuse ROTC on Campus

Today, U.S. Senator Scott Brown (R-MA) issued the following statement on Harvard University’s decision to continue its ROTC ban:

“I am extremely disappointed to learn of Harvard University’s decision to continue to ban ROTC from its campus. It is incomprehensible to me that Harvard does not allow ROTC to use its facilities, but welcomes students who are in this country illegally. Harvard President Faust has been lobbying on Capitol Hill in support of the DREAM Act, which would grant legal status to illegal immigrants attending college. Harvard has its priorities upside down. They should embrace young people who want to serve their country at a time of war, rather than promoting a plan that provides amnesty to students who are in this country illegally.”