Common Core, who supports it, who opposes it and why. The final battle for freedom…

WHO ARE THE PLAYERS?

The Left:  loves the upside down history rewritten to show America’s heroes as villains, loves the super sexed texts and progressive themes.  Loves the emphasis on politically correct “group think” over individual responsibility, loves the humanist approach and moral relativity taught today, loves the “one World” theme of equalizing outcomes.

They do not like the accountability measures now used to pay teachers based on student test scores (rightly so), as teachers do not control what they teach and how they teach any longer.  They are not allowed to use different methodologies to reach different learners and spend only about 20% of their time teaching a standard curriculum they do not control.  They are now glorified hall monitors, administering tests about 40% of the time and managing data for the bureaucrats the rest.

Billionaire Industrialists (commonly confused with The Right): loves factory style education, calling students “human capital,” who are ideally trained to become compliant and replaceable cogs in the corporate wheel, hates the unions (rightly) as they are only protecting their membership who have delivered “bad product” out of our schools, obsessed with control and power over the schools and feels “if you don’t measure it, you don’t care about it.”  They believe in the free market producing better results as parents will “vote with their feet” and flee failing schools.  They believe vouchers from the government should go to any school parents decide.

While “choice” is best, they also have destroyed market differentiation in the “education product,” by demanding compliance with the failed Common Core Curriculum and demanded adherence to strict Federal controls.  If schools take these vouchers, they must comply with National Standards (Common Core) and the 1,061 page ESSA (Every Student Succeeds Act) passed by Congress.  There is NO choice in that because federal money depends on compliance.  It is coercion and bribery.

They believe we must have “higher standards” and you can’t trust states or school districts to manage this, so it must be national standards.  This logic conflicts with the idea of the free market because we now have a nationalized monopoly on One Size Fits All education.  Though Common Core was sold to them (and you hear it ad nauseam) as “High Standards” it is anything BUT.  It was never tested before being rolled out nationally and test scores have plummeted precipitously as a result.  Crazy math has permanently crippled higher math and logic skills and our grad schools are mostly populated by foreigners.

They have completely lost sight of the purpose of education promoted by our founding fathers.  It is not to “train” workers, but broaden and develop the individual’s God given talent and intellect, to build logic skills and creativity.  Rather than fostering innovation, and seeking truth, we now have “settled science” and political correctness numbing our children’s skulls full of mush.

In addition to the “Right” and the Left, we have the education establishment and lobbyists.  For them, it’s also about the money and power.  If history and math don’t change, why buy new books?  Why adopt new electronic solutions in education if testing and data mining is not mandated?  Never mind the enormous costs and studies showing students learn less on computers than from physical books.  Never mind the massive disruption in class and cheating potential.  Then they can offer more new products to solve all the problems caused by the latest new “education fad.”  Yes, all change is good for them if it includes new products.   Medical and Education experts have produced mountains of evidence against Common Core, but it has fallen on deaf legislative ears stuffed with money from lobbyists.

What about the parents?

And the resounding answer is, “Who Cares!”  Across the nation, the movement to Stop Common Core has reached every state and every school board race. Even our Presidential candidates nearly all condemned common core and promised its demise as unconstitutional  federal overreach.  Donald Trump promised to get rid of it and hundreds of thousands likely voted for him for that ONE promise.  But I have learned one thing.  It is necessary to watch the feet, and NOT the lips.

Betsy DeVos, who was chosen to carry out this promise is one of the Billionaire Industrialist complex, and always has fought FOR Common Core and national standards.  Her entire staff is the same and there will be no progress on Common Core without a serious effort mounted by grass roots activists the likes of which we have not yet seen.

Have you noticed no one is mentioning Common Core in the media?  The battle against confirming DeVos as Secretary of Education was completely portrayed as the unions against Trump.

The true customers for the “product” of education are all the citizens of the United States of America. Just after the Constitution was approved, Benjamin Franklin said, “We have a Republic, Mam, if you can keep it.”

As President Lincoln said, “The philosophy in the classroom in one generation will be the philosophy in government in the next.”

Today, most can’t even tell you what form of government we have and why.  They will likely say we have a democracy.  The word “Democracy” does not appear in the Constitution of the United States or any of the 50 state constitutions for a reason.  Our founding fathers who studied the nature of man and government, carefully crafted a Republic.  They loathed and feared democracy.  This short You Tube explains:

They knew freedom comes from the hand of God and the rule of law, not the vote of the majority.  Yet today, our students, teachers, legislators and media use those terms interchangeably.  We have strayed so far largely because of factory education and government monopoly on curriculum since the advent of the US Department of Education.  As in most government programs, costs have soared while results have declined.

If we truly taught our most important civics lesson, the Constitution, we would see that the federal government is a creation of sovereign states with few and defined responsibilities as defined in Article 1 section 8.  Education is not a delegated power.  The 10^th amendment states that “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

The longer we allow the unconstitutional federal control of education and Common Core remains, the more time this insidious poison with steal the hearts and minds of our children, and the future of our nation.

We must throw off the yoke of oppression by insisting that our elected local and state legislators who have a sworn duty to uphold the Constitution in their oath of office, declare this a violation of the Constitution and nullify any and all federal involvement in education.  It’s as simple as that! Just say NO!  We will not comply with unconstitutional power grabs by the federal government.

My goodness, people!  Is there no end to what you will tolerate?  How many of your children have been lost already to socialism.  Why do you send them off to public schools and colleges that steal their religion, their morality, their sensibility and replace it with huge debt and no usable knowledge?  Is that what you wanted for their future?

In our comfort and complacence, we have forgotten that we are the guardians of the lamp of freedom and the light of the World.  We have forgotten the sacrifices of all those who gave us this great nation.

Our Declaration of Independence places the authority and responsibility on each of us. ”When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. “

So where are YOU? What will you do for our children and our future?

---