“You’re lined up against business interests, the entire public school bureaucracy, Bill Gates and his billions, public broadcasting, the rest of the media, the Chamber of Commerce, and every elected official who is indebted to the Chamber of Commerce, which means virtually every elected official,” Says Tina Trent, who has been leading Common Core workshops […]
The Washington Post reported that within two years of an organizational meeting at Bill Gates’ Seattle headquarters, 45 states and the District of Columbia had adopted the Common Core State Standards. President Obama, whose administration was “populated by former Gates Foundation staffers and associates,” was “a major booster.” After legislative battles this year, 42 states […]
Larry Grathwohl was one of a disappearing breed, from the working class, an American patriot, who had a clear moral vision. He fought communists in the jungles of Vietnam and then in their clandestine cells here in America. He was a gentleman, respectful of women, a loving father and grandfather. A year after his untimely death, I […]
HOW TO BREAK THE STRANGLEHOLD Conform: Exposing the Truth about Common Core and Public Education By Glenn Beck with Kyle Olson Simon & Schuster, New York, 2014 PB, 258 pages, US$14.99 978-1-1-4767-7388-9 Reviewed by Mary Grabar | May 29, 2014 How many ways are there to beat the teachers unions? Not teachers, but the ideological union leaders […]
Unbeknownst to the general public, freshman composition has become the point of attack by all those who would like to tear down the superstructure of our civilization. In the 1990s we had the attack by the maternalists on the thesis statement for its “phallologocentrism” (i.e., logic). They argued that the five-paragraph essay replicated the thinking […]
In my previous article on the “new Common Core democracy” I reported on my experiences at various public hearings where Georgia citizens were allowed to speak for one to three minutes. This included the November 2013 Georgia state school board meeting where their parent engagement program manager, Michelle Tarbutton Sandrock, , elaborated at length about the presumed […]
College Board dictates for the new Advanced Placement U.S. History exam have already garnered criticism. Jane Robbins and Larry Krieger charged that the new course of study “inculcates a consistently negative view of the nation’s past.” Units on colonial America stress “the development of a ‘rigid racial hierarchy’ and a ‘strong belief in British racial and cultural […]
Maya Soetoro-Ng speaks at 2008 Democratic National Convention that nominated her brother Barack Obama. A social studies ‘peace and social justice educator,’ she also addressed the 2010 NCSS annual convention in Denver, a global forum for student indoctrination. The word “doing” appears frequently in the NCSS guidelines, as it does in the Department of Education’s […]
Here in Georgia, politicians and state school board members did a lot of listening in the months before and after state Sen. William Ligon (R-Brunswick) introduced his Common Core withdrawal bill. Listening sessions were held across the state in the months before the legislative session began in January. Parents testified about the crazy homework and […]
Pro-Common Core groups astro-turf the illusion of overwhelming support for the program. Earlier this week opponents of the “Common Core State Standards” cautiously celebrated their first major victory as Governor Mike Pence signed legislation withdrawing Indiana from the nationalized education program. But in Georgia, the pro-Common Core big business/big government forces outgunned the grassroots and celebrated victory on […]
Ending inequities in academic outcomes drives much of the decision-making for bureaucrats who run our schools. Ultimately, the education bureaucrats, who are beholden to Washington, express much anxiety over losing federal aid. The message from Washington is that outcomes will be equalized. It’s in the President’s proposed education budget and new guidelines to eliminate “disparate […]
Colleges and universities are embracing “food studies” primarily as another way of pushing leftist beliefs. In the Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne describes one of the characters at the Custom House who is well suited to government work. He is the Inspector, an epicurean so devoid of imagination, feeling, and soul that he is likened to “the […]
Remember the children singing praise songs to Obama back in 2008? Remember young teenage boys marching in formation and shouting out thanks to Obama for their promising futures? The appointment of Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education initially was seen as a savvy bipartisan move. But under his watch the Department of Education has become a propaganda […]
“Real learning takes place outside the classroom,” the late communist history professor Howard Zinn famously said. Zinn practiced what he preached and led his students at Spelman College and Boston University on marches and protests. The 1960s saw plenty of teach-ins and marches by students and some radical professors. But even then it would have […]
“Conceived as the Democratic answer to the Heritage Foundation,” the George Soros-founded and funded Center for American Progress (CAP) was considered Hillary Clinton’s think-tank at its inception in 2003. President and CEO John Podesta, once Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, was seen as its nominal head. CAP was viewed as “a kind of Clinton White-House-in-exile – […]