Category: Common Core
Susquehanna Valley Conservatives host Lindsey Burke who will speak on Common Core
Lindsey M. Burke will be the guest on Monday, September 9 at 7:00PM when SVC will address a subject that should be of interest to all parents and grandparents who care about the future of education for their children and grandchildren. Common Core Standards, a highly controversial topic facing school districts throughout the state of Pennsylvania will be the subject for the evening. You, along with twenty-one school district superintendents and school board presidents, are invited and encouraged to attend this important meeting at the Best Western Country Cupboard Inn, Lewisburg.
Lindsey M. Burke, who researches and writes on federal and state education issues, will address the topic, “No Child is Common: Resisting National Standards and Tests.” Ms. Burke is a Will Skillman fellow in education at The Heritage Foundation where she focuses on reducing the federal role in education. She has appeared on CNN and Fox News Channel as well as numerous national television and regional radio programs including Bill Bennett’s “Morning in America.”
Ask a Horse . . . . It Doesn’t Add Up
PI2013 #541 – It Doesn’t Add Up
ASK A HORSE
“The State did not own men so entirely, even when it could send them to the stake, as it sometimes does now where it can send them to the elementary school.” ~ G.K. Chesterton
Tuesday,
August 20th, 2013
Liberty Lovers,
http://www.usdebtclock.org: Every American Taxpayer Now “Owes” “The (federal) State” $148,085, every citizen $53,424.
‘Education’ Has A Singular purpose – to control behavior. Political candidates, public officials, elitists — anyone who seeks to control (or predict) people’s behavior knows this. Few, if any, legislators or ‘government’ (“State”) chief executives or legislators have higher priorities than ‘education’ control.
“Every generation of school-age children has imprinted upon it a politically correct ideology concerning America’s past and the sanctity of the role of the state in society.” ~ Richard Eberling
News Media Are Airing critiques of an ‘educational’ initiative called “Common Core,” an initiative aimed at establishing learning goals for students through grade twelve. One critique includes a classroom setting clip where competency evaluation would give credit to students concluding 4 x 3 = 11, provided students could rationalize their answers.
Glenn Beck’s Show, Today, delivered a scathing assessment of Common Core, saying parents would be unable to help students because Common Core concepts are not consistent with typical learning processes or outcomes.
“Education does not mean teaching people to know what they do not know; it means teaching them to behave as they do not behave.” ~ John Ruskin
“Education” Enables People To control their behavior, be competent, successful, self-reliant. “We, the American People” should not allow instructional methods or goals where informational inaccuracy is acceptable.
People Intending To Live In Liberty do not allow legislators – or other public officials within These United States of America, to prohibit or restrict private ownership of firearms and ammunition from any citizen of good repute and responsible standing. They hold fast their ability to ward off would-be tyranny.
Let Freedom Ring
Choose http://citizencontrolledtaxation.com
It’s your property, not “State” property.
Best Wishes,
Len Ritchey
ASK A HORSE commentaries are on Facebook, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/citizencontrolledtaxation, and http://groups.yahoo.com/group/itsyourproperty; they are considered public domain information. Readers are welcome to use commentaries as they like. Please advise askahorse@letsgofirstclass.com if you do not wish to receive future ASK A HORSE commentaries.
SUN Area Council of Republican Women Formally Opposes Common Core Standards
Resolution on Common Core State Standards and Assessments
WHEREAS, The Common Core State Standards Initiative (“Common Core”), and its Pennsylvania implementation now known as Pennsylvania Academic Standards, are a set of academic standards, promoted and supported by two private organizations, the National Governor’s Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) as a method for conforming American students to uniform (“one size fits all”) achievement goals to make them more competitive in a global marketplace; and,
What is “common core?” Heartland Insitute put together a one page sheet outlining the facts . . .
PFRW Calls August 2013 Board Meeting
Dear PFRW Board Members, Directors and Council Presidents:
PFRW is on the move with several exciting events being planned for August, September and October. I wanted to take a few moments to tell you about them.
First of all, our next PFRW Board Meeting is scheduled for Friday, August 9th at 2 p.m. I hope you are able to join us as we meet in Canonsburg, PA. Complete details on the board meeting were sent out earlier this month. Board reports are due by August 2, 2013 for inclusion in the board packets. Reports should be sent in to PFRW by email (pfrw@comcast.net) or regular mail (PA Federation of Republican Women, 806 North Second Street, Harrisburg, PA, 17102. I would like to have the chance to read them, too so please feel free to email yours to me at hatton81@msn.com or send by regular mail to 13 Sunset Drive, Clinton PA 15026.
Council Presidents and PFRW members are always welcome to attend our board meetings. Local council members should let their president know that they are attending the board meeting. Council presidents should notify their regional director if they and/or some of their members will be coming. I want to make sure everyone is introduced and welcomed.
As was previously announced, the North and South West Regional Conference will be held August 9 and 10 in Canonsburg, PA. The South Central Regional Conference is set for September 28th at the Radisson Hotel and Conference Center in Camp Hill, PA. The North Central PFRW Fall Conference will be October 19th at the Shade Mountain Winery in Middleburg, PA. Information on each of these events was sent out via email and regular mail. There are also details on the PFRW web site (www.pfrw.org) and our new Facebook Page at Pennsylvania Federation of Republican Women. Make sure you “like” us!
Meryl M. Hatton, President
PA Federation of Republican Women
To make reservations – August 2013 Call to Board Meeting
Mifflin County Tea Party Patriots Meeting – June 10, 2013
The Mifflin County Tea Party Patriots will meet on Monday, June 10th at 6:30 pm at the Mifflin County Library in Lewistown.
Come out for an evening of updates regarding
- common core
- smart meters
- the IRS
- “Occupy”
- Anything else you want to discuss that you think is important
Rotten to the Core: The Feds’ Invasive Student Tracking Database
Rotten to the Core: The Feds’ Invasive Student Tracking Database
By Michelle Malkin • March 8, 2013 09:41 AM
Rotten to the Core: The Feds’ Invasive Student Tracking Database
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2012
(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 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 of information plunder. “This is going to be a huge win for us,” Jeffrey Olen, a product manager at education software company CompassLearning, told Reuters. 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=studentElementarySecondary, 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.
***
Related:
My child’s Common Core-aligned Algebra book is crap
Opposition to the Common Core Proliferating
***
Previous:
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
Fuzzy math: A nationwide epidemic
Obama’s Sputter-nik moment: Cash for Education Clunkers
January 2005: NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND, ACT II
February 2005: THE REVOLT AGAINST NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND
Stupid education fad of the day: “Mayan Math”
***
More resources/background/links:
Barry Garelick: A New Kind of Problem: The Common Core Math Standards
EmpoweredGA.org – Georgia activists: Here, here, here and here.
Pennsylvania revolt against TERC Investigations math.
http://truthinamericaneducation.com/
http://www.utahnsagainstcommoncore.com/
Indiana: hoosiersagainstcommoncore.com
***
And more:
“Related Websites” from Truth in American Education has links to all of the following:
Alabamians United for Excellence in Education
Arizonans Against Common Core
Californians United Against Common Core
Closing the Door on Innovation Why One National Curriculum Is Bad for America
Common Core: Education Without Representation
Common Core Facts
Hoosiers Against Common Core
Keep Education Local
Missouri Coalition Against Common Core
Pioneer Institute Public Policy Research: Academic Standards
Stop Common Core: Reclaiming Local Control in Education
Tennessee Against Common Core
United States Coalition for World Class Math: Common Core Standards
Utahns Against Common Core
Utah’s Republic: Common Core Standards
Where’s the Math? Common Core State Standards
Where’s the Math? Standard Algorithms in the Common Core State Standards
Quote of the day . . . regarding common core
Twenty-five years ago, President Reagan, paraphrasing Education Secretary William Bennett, said: “If you serve a child a rotten hamburger in America, federal, state and local agencies will investigate you, summon you, close you down, whatever. But if you provide a child with a rotten education, nothing happens, except that you’re liable to be given more money to do it with.”
Students Asked to ‘Argue That Jews Are Evil’ and Prove Nazi Loyalty in Assignment Linked to Common Core
I attended the webinar that American for Prosperity hosted on Wednesday evening. Texas stopped common core in there state. We in Pennsylvania can do the same if we stick together and fight!
Rock Star GOP - Grassroots Activism Awareness 