Common Core: The Final Deathblow to Our Education System

The recent SCS Teacher's strike has brought education to the forefront in this community, and while ending this strike in a way that makes our school system stronger is the hope of all, it is small potatoes compared to the real battle that Ohio and the rest of the country are facing on education:  The implementation of Common Core standards.

If you have a child in K-12 or are planning on having children in the future, it's time to wake up and educate yourself on the Common Core standards, coming to Ohio schools in 2014.  

If you asked your child's teacher what exactly they will be learning this year, wished to see the curriculum and asked for some samples of how it will be instructed and were told "No" by that teacher...would you be okay with that?  

I hope not.  If you said no, well, get used to it if you plan on sitting silently while Common Core takes hold of Ohio schools, because that is exactly what your teachers response will be required to be.

It is our last chance to keep education in the hands of parents and local/state government.  Once this battle is lost, there is no going back and there will be no parental say in what or how your child is taught.  And don't bother contacting the school board or your teachers and principals once this system is in place, because they will have no say in the matter either.  Think you're safe because your kids go to private school?  Maybe you home school and think you're in the clear?  Wrong.  EVERYONE will be affected.  Testing standards are already changed or in the process of being changed.  That means that if you want to take the SAT, PSAT, ACT, etc., you had better be educated by the "Common Core" curriculum, or you won't have a chance.  So the federal government will hold both funding and student's ability to gain entrance to colleges as leverage to coerce all educational programs into following Common Core standards.  

Please, do your research!  Ask questions.  If you have not heard of this program that is being shoved down our throats as fast as possible, don't you think that is reason enough you should be scratching your head on what Common Core is actually all about?  Don't wait for other people to be the start of a grassroots campaign to eradicate this from the Ohio education system.  It's your children and future children that are going to suffer and if you choose to remain silent and not interested in knowing what your kids are learning, then you have no right to complain when you see the destruction and havoc this will wreak upon our schools systems.

And the dumbing down of our children is just the very beginning here (please take a look at links below to see just how drastically ineffective the teaching process has been altered and what kind of material your kids will be studying...and what kind of materials will be banned).  Data mining and student tracking are all part of the equation as well.  No big deal?  Think again.  Over 400 data points are being tracked from start to finish of your child in their school.  And not "male or female."  They want to know your religion, who you live with, where your bus picks you up, disabilities, etc.  No one collects this much information for FUN folks!  It's going to be harvested, sold and used against you later if necessary.  Everything will become permanent record.  Think long term.  "Oh, I see Rick had to visit the school psychologist in high school."  If you don't think that will lead down the road of "Rick" possibly being classified as "mentally unstable" when it comes to revoking rights such as his right to bear arms later in life, then you are thinking in the box that has been constructed for you by the federal government.  

There are so many dangers of this data mining/tracking that it is not even fathomable to know what freedoms and liberties could be stripped away at anytime.  No person, corporation or especially GOVERNMENT should own this much personal data on any citizen without them giving it of their own free will.  Too much power (taken against our rights to privacy) in the hands of too few will equal disaster.  It never fails.

Michelle Malkin has been a pioneer in exposing the Common Core standards for what they really are all about:  Control.  

The following was taken from Malkin's website in a post titled "Rotten to the Core: The Feds' Invasive Student Tracking Database" (www.michellemalkin.com - a wealth of information on Common Core is here and links will be provided at end of this blog post):

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 Principles Project, a conservative education think tank, reported last year, Common Core’s technological project is “merely one part of a much broader plan by the federal government to track individuals from birth through their participation in the workforce.” The 2009 porkulus package included a “State Fiscal Stabilization Fund” to bribe states into constructing “longitudinal data systems (LDS) to collect data on public-school students.”

These systems will aggregate massive amounts of personal data — health-care histories, income information, religious affiliations, voting status and even blood types and homework completion. The data will be available to a wide variety of public agencies. And despite federal student-privacy protections guaranteed by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, the Obama administration is paving the way for private entities to buy their way into the data boondoggle. Even more alarming, the U.S. Department of Education is encouraging a radical push from aggregate-level data-gathering to invasive individual student-level data collection.

At the South by Southwest education conference in Austin, Texas, this week, education technology gurus were salivating at the prospects ofinformation plunder. “This is going to be a huge win for us,” Jeffrey Olen, a product manager at education software company CompassLearning, toldReuters. Cha-ching-ching-ching.

The company is already aggressively marketing curricular material “aligned” to fuzzy, dumbed-down Common Core math and reading guidelines (which more than a dozen states are now revolting against). Along with two dozen other tech firms, CompassLearning sees even greater financial opportunities to mine Common Core student tracking systems. The centralized database is a strange-bedfellows alliance between the liberal Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (which largely underwrote and promoted the Common Core curricular scheme) and a division of conservative Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. (which built the database infrastructure).

Another nonprofit startup, “inBloom, Inc.,” has evolved out of that partnership to operate the database. The Gates Foundation and other partners provided $100 million in seed money. Reuters reports that inBloom, Inc. will “likely start to charge fees in 2015″ to states and school districts participating in the system. “So far, seven states — Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, North Carolina and Massachusetts — have committed to enter data from select school districts. Louisiana and New York will be entering nearly all student records statewide.”

The National Education Data Model, available online at http://nces.sifinfo.org/datamodel/eiebrowser/techview.aspx?instance=stud..., lists hundreds of data points considered indispensable to the nationalized student tracking racket. These include:

–”Bus Stop Arrival Time” and “Bus Stop Description.”

–”Dwelling arrangement.”

–”Diseases, Illnesses and Other Health Conditions.”

–”Religious Affiliation.”

–”Telephone Number Type” and “Telephone Status.”

Home-schoolers and religious families that reject traditional government education would be tracked. Original NEDM data points included hair color, eye color, weight, blood types and even dental status.

How exactly does amassing and selling such personal data improve educational outcomes? It doesn’t. This, at its core, is the central fraud of Washington’s top-down nationalized curricular scheme. The Bill Gates-endorsed Common Core “standards” are a phony pretext for big-government expansion. The dazzling allure of “21st-century technology” masks the privacy-undermining agenda of nosy bureaucratic drones allergic to transparency, accountability and parental autonomy. Individual student privacy is sacrificed at the collective “For the Children” altar.

Fed Ed is not about excellence or academic achievement. It’s about control, control and more control.

This isn't "for the kids."  This is purely a way to collect data, gain control and literally dumb down our children.  

If you aren't a bit scared by this and think "so what" or "conspiracy theory," then you have your head buried deeply into the sand and I truly wish the best for your children.  They will have to rely on others who deal in reality, with their eyes open, to speak on their behalf while you ignore the issue.

Don't be that parent or citizen.  

That being said, there is still time to educate yourself and put a stop to a completely untested, federally administered one-size-fits-all indoctrination system to be implemented in our schools, but we must act NOW and in large numbers if we have any hope of doing so!

"An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people."

-Thomas Jefferson

Below are links to help you both educate yourself on Common Core standards and how to fight its implementation:

READ: From Heather Patenaude – Open letter to parents on publc schooled children regarding Common Core

Attention, homeschoolers: Keep on top of which homeschool curricula are rejecting Common Core.

Parents, know your rights: From Christel Swasey – On FERPA and Common Core in Utah: How to Protect Our State’s Freedoms?

More FERPA background/resources.

***

Michelle Malkin's Rotten to the Core series:

Rotten to the Core, Part 4: The Feds’ Invasive Student Tracking Database

Rotten to the Core, Part 3: Lessons from Texas and the Growing Grassroots Revolt

Rotten to the Core, Part 2: Readin’, writin’ and deconstructionism

Rotten to the Core, Part 1: Obama’s War on Academic Standards

Rotten to the Core: Reader feedback from the frontlines

My child’s Common Core-aligned Algebra book is crap

***

On a related note, via The Blaze: ‘LET GO OF THE SYSTEM’: HOW CAN PARENTS & TEACHERS STOP CSCOPE?

http://www.glennbeck.com/2013/03/14/exposing-common-core-kids-are-being-...

I don't care if you use my sources or your own, I just beg each and every one of you with children to please educate yourselves before it's too late.  Once this is fully implemented, there truly may never be any going back and we have fundamentally lost any control we had left over what our children will learn.

-BM