The Truth About Common Core

In my last article, I mentioned COMMON CORE. Some of you do not know what this is.

 Common Core is a curriculum to be very wary of based on the people who are putting it together, one of whom is Linda-Darling Hammond who was endorsed by domestic terrorist Bill Ayers for Secretary of Education and served as an advisor to the Obama campaign.

What EXACTLY is Common Core?

Essentially it is a standardized, all-out assault on learning: it is designed to further lower schools standards and is supported by the teachers' unions which have a self-serving interest in avoiding as much accountability as possible; the lower the standards, the less push back against the teachers, too many of whom are failing the young trapped in the government schools. The over arching ideology that shapes this agenda is far leftist ideology, that is  much more intense and deliberately focused than that which tends to be a somewhat sporadic, less uniform at present.

Okay. But can you give us some examples.

The curriculum even includes teaching math in such a way, that non ideological Math experts who have looked at the proposed programs are telling us that "it marks the end of improvement in education." Moreover it devalues and de-emphasizes traditional literary works in favor of song lyrics and of course, government documents. I am willing to bet that these documents will be carefully cropped to make the left all-powerful and the only channel of the flow of such information, or should we say disinformation?

These are for starters.

Why is this happening?

The left, in order to increase its hegemony, its total control, permanently, since we are still  "a democracy" of sorts, that is, requires an absolutely ignorant as possible cadre of voters. It isn't enough that the mainstream media, almost all of the organs of the dissemination of vital information are in collusion with the left and extremely dangerous, double faced organizations, such as CAIR, it is necessary to destroy any vestige of Constitution-upholding citizens if at all possible. It is too late for the older generation who were not indoctrinated in the government schools, but the young are vulnerable.

Currently only five states do not have any aspect of the Common Core curriculum programs. Maine is not one of them, most unfortunately. The five states are Alaska, Texas, Nebraska, Virginia and Minnesota.

There are many logos for the various subsets of Common Core, one of which is an apple that has been bitten into on both sides. This reminds me of the serpent in the garden with Eve who has taken a bite out of the apple - she chooses what is good and evil, not God - then hands the apple to Adam who eats of it also. The apple has always been a symbol for the teacher, but as an unblemished, whole fruit, until now.

I believe that this is why Obama wants to begin with mandating school for impoverished 4 year olds, under the pretext of preparing them for a global economy, to further Common Core. Once the public becomes used to this, then it will be mandated for all 4 year olds. Five years is just too old - Mom and Dad may have already begun to instill the ideal of true liberty and the natural law principles that go hand in hand. By this time, he and his so-called Department of Justice and other agencies will have striven to have home schooling outlawed. If he is no longer in office, the war against normalcy and meritorious standards will  be carried on with whatever means are available to those still entrenched in government agencies where policy is issued. 

Parents who do not want their children indoctrinated for the left at present have a choice and choice for the "pro-choice" crowd only means abortion, not education.

Let us listen to Michelle Malkin, who says it best of all. This excerpt is taken from an article about  Common Core from her web site, link HERE. [Text below in Red, emphasis in bold added by me.]

For decades, collectivist agitators in our schools have chipped away at academic excellence in the name of fairness, diversity and social justice. “Progressive” reformers 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.

Under President Obama, these top-down mal-formers — empowered by Washington education bureaucrats and backed by misguided liberal philanthropists led by billionaire Bill Gates — are now presiding over a radical makeover of your children's school curriculum. It's being done in the name of federal "Common Core" standards that do anything but raise achievement standards.

Common Core was enabled by Obama's federal stimulus law and his Department of Education's "Race to the Top"gimmickry. The administration bribed cash-starved states into adopting unseen instructional standards as a condition of winning billions of dollars in grants. Even states that lost their bids for Race to the Top money were required to commit to a dumbed-down and amorphous curricular "alignment."

In practice, Common Core's dubious "college-and career"-ready standards undermine local control of education, usurp state autonomy over curricular materials, and foist untested, mediocre and incoherent pedagogical theories on America’s schoolchildren.

Over the next several weeks and months, I’ll use this column space to expose who’s behind this disastrous scheme in D.C. backrooms. I’ll tell you who’s fighting it in grassroots tea party and parental revolts across the country from Massachusetts to Indiana, Texas, Georgia and Utah. And most importantly, I’ll explain how this unprecedented federal meddling is corrupting our children’s classrooms and textbooks.

There’s no better illustration of Common Core’s duplicitous talk of higher standards than to start with its math "reforms." While Common Core promoters assert their standards are "internationally benchmarked," independent members of the expert panel in charge of validating the standards refute the claim. Panel member Dr. Sandra Stotsky of the University of Arkansas reported, "No material was ever provided to the Validation Committee or to the public on the specific college readiness expectations of other leading nations in mathematics" or other subjects.

In fact, 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."

Under Common Core, as the American Principles Project and Pioneer Institute point out, algebra I instruction is pushed to 9th grade, instead of 8th grade, as commonly taught. Division is postponed from 5th to 6th grade. Prime factorization, common denominators, conversions of fractions and decimals, and algebraic manipulation are de-emphasized or eschewed. Traditional Euclidean geometry is replaced with an experimental approach that had not been previously pilot-tested in the U.S.

Ze'ev Wurman, a prominent software architect, electrical engineer and longtime math advisory expert in California and Washington, D.C., points out that Common Core delays proficiency with addition and subtraction until 4th grade and proficiency with basic multiplication until 5th grade, and skimps on logarithms, mathematical induction, parametric equations and trigonometry at the high school level.

I cannot sum up the stakes any more clearly than Wurman did in his critique of this mess and the vested interests behind it:

"I believe the 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. Moreover, there are organizations that have reasons to work for lower and less-demanding standards, specifically teachers unions and professional teacher organizations. While they may not admit it, they have a vested interest in lowering the accountability bar for their members. … This will be done in the name of 'critical thinking' and '21st-century' skills, and in faraway Washington, D.C., well beyond the reach of parents and most states and employers."

Please bookmark this page. I will be bringing you updates regularly as I accrue them.

I referred to an organization, CAIR, above. What is it and why should we all be concerned?

You could say, without any exaggeration, that CAIR is the media's "common core." How?

CAIR is the acronym for The Council on American–Islamic Relations, a PR front group that presents the good face of Islam to the public. It has tentacles throughout government and the media that either knowingly or stupidly act as propaganda shills for Muslim extremists. CAIR has strong ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Both depend on preventing the public from seeing through their ultimate goals - Islam the dominant power and belief system in the world and the establishment of the Caliphate. Period. Only they cannot let us know this. They exploit Americans' lack of common sense and reason in re "discrimination" in order to mis-direct our attention and change our ideas about Islam. The term Islamphobia is bandied about as if we are all evil for rejecting elements of Islam or all of it, as we should. One CAIR honcho on one of their web sites some time ago boasted about the group's ability to get us to comply in so many words. CAIR also has its sinewy clutches into various financial institutions, etc. I suspect, although I cannot prove it right now, that CAIR has a hand in Common Core principles. Certainly at present the American government schools are pro-Islamic and anti-Christian, very important for CAIR. There was even a Supreme Court case that did not make it through Certiorari - in effect, the Islamists won big time in the New York schools because the Supreme Court permitted a lower court ruling favoring the favoritism of Islam in public schools over that of the Christians. Just think about this, folks!

CAIR pressures journalists to cease using the term Islamist because to them it ought not connote and denote what it actually, rightly does. One cannot adequately address and fight against a concept or idea that one is not permitted to name. At best a distortion but the intent is to remove it from the American mind. How many times have we heard a reporter's account or read a story that this word is absent from and a politically correct substitute is used, like Jihadist? Now Jihadist is a warrior for a holy war. But there is only one kind and that is Islamic. We are not supposed to connect the two. Of course, fundamentalist and Christian are paired by our sell-out journalists ad infinitem so as to prejudice the public unfairly. The defense of Christ the King, why that is such a threat, don't you know! But Allah's war on the West, well, that's okay for now, it fits our agenda.

When anyone raises the alarm about CC [Common Core] and CAIR, their spokesmen just offer the usual clichés about alarmists and so forth, then provide some soothing talk to allay public fears. The public, wanting things to just go away as it has too much to deal with as it is, buys it all too many times. We are losing our culture, our Western heritage, our religious rights, our freedoms, one at a time, our very country and so few as yet realize it. The revolution needs this mindset to succeed. I am determined that this will not happen and there are others, too. Do not let the insurgents against common sense, the ideals of the natural law, and above all the Social Reign of Christ the King maintain their already powerful grip on those in power. Make no mistake they are after total control and no-choice, not pro-choice. Now Islam does not favor abortion. Once they become dominant I am not certain that their useful idiots - the left - will know how to handle this reality, which they have discarded for the moment - strange bedfellows and all. Perhaps the Islamics will permit America to continue to abort herself into oblivion and such degradation of immorality that America will cease all together, which suits them I am sure, just so long as they have control of what is left of the finances and infra structure.

Do not be deterred by the politically correct statements, the disarming palaver in the media. What else would you expect from those with such an evil agenda? The truth, an admission? Oh, come on people ...

The banner image was put together thus: the twice bitten apple for COMMON CORE and the green serpent for CAIR. Green is the color symbol of the Caliphate. The snake for the devil in the details.

 

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