You Just Can’t Kill The Beast

commoncore“And in the master’s chambers they gathered for the feast, They stab it with their steely knives but they just can’t kill the beast.  Last thing I remember I was running for the door,  I had to find the passage back to the place I was before. Relax,  said the night man, We are programmed to receive. You can check out any time you like but you can never leave.”  Eagles, Hotel California

The popularity of Common Core has taken a nosedive. A recent CBS News poll found that 59% of those familiar with the program dislike it and for good reason.  Not only are the teaching philosophies totally bizarre, but  2015 SAT scores were the lowest in a decade.  According to The National Assessment of Educational Progress, which tests fourth- and eighth-graders in math and reading, scores drop for the first time in more than two decades. 

Parents may hate it but killing it is all but impossible. It is, after all,  the dream of the world’s elite to produce “citizens” who know “their place” in the managed economy and global society. 

Standards for Common Core were created with minimal public engagement, driven by policy makers in D.C. In fact, they were developed by an organization called Achieve and the National Governors Association, both of which were generously funded by the Bill Gates Foundation, and your typical left-wing organizations like the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Institute, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Rand Corporation, etc. The BBC reported that fundamentalist Muslim nations that sponsor worldwide terrorism, are also connected with Common Core standards, and you know how important they believe it is to education America’s children.

In a nut shell, Common Core was created as nationalized education, a federal, top-down approach based on Collectivism rather than individual achievement, sold as a set of rigorous internationally benchmarked standards to bring uniformity to education. Knowledge, understanding, critical thinking, and comprehension under Common Core standards gave way to socialist global values, beliefs, feelings and behaviors. After all comrade, one of the requirements of a good ‘global citizenship’ is the concept of ‘shared responsibility’ and ‘shared sacrifice’ in creating a ‘sustainable’ world, or as Obama once called it a “collective salvation,” that revolves around his socialist goals of redistribution of wealth and the Marxian definition of equality and fairness.

A particularly troubling aspect of the Common Core scheme is the emphasis on massive data-collection on students, and the sharing of that data for various purposes essentially unrelated to genuine education. The National Education Data Model includes over 400 data points, including health history, disciplinary history, family income range, voting status, religious affiliation, and on and on.  Joy Pullmann of the Heartland Institute  discovered a report by the Department of Education that revealed Common Core’s data mining may one day include monitoring techniques like “Function Magnetic Resonance Imaging” (brain scans)“ as well as “using cameras to judge facial expressions, an electronic seat that judges posture, a pressure-sensitive computer mouse and a biometric wrap on kids’ wrists.”

The wealth of data collected on students and their families is a hugely tempting target for people with malicious motives. But as serious as this problem is, the deeper problem is that the government has deemed our children little machines to be programmed, “human capital” to be exploited.

Many key state-level players who ushered in Common Core — state superintendents, board of education members, governors, and legislators — are still in office. They will never admit that Common Core is nothing more than a low-quality, teach-to-the-test mentality, and intrusive data-collection emanating from the scheme. And politicians certainly don’t want to lose all that “pocket change” for supporting such a lavish gravy train for large corporations like GE, Microsoft, or News Corp.

So parents who thought their state legislatures had removed Common Core and instituted better quality teaching standards will eventually realize that  all they got from their state representatives was a slight of hand, rebranded Common Core, from a government so arrogant that they think parents won’t notice that their children are still suffering under the same standards of progressive education fads and diminished academic content.    

“Yes, man is made for work, but he’s also made for so much more… Education should be about the highest things. We should study these things of the stars, plant cells, Mozart’s Requiem… not simply because they’ll get us into the right college or into the right line of work. Rather, we should study these noble things because they can tell us who we are, why we’re here… If education has become –as Common Core openly declares– preparation for work in a global economy, then this situation is far worse than Common Core critics ever anticipated. And the concerns about cost, and quality, and yes, even the constitutionality of Common Core, pale in comparison to the concerns for the hearts, minds, and souls of American children.” Daniel Coupland, Ph.D. Hillsdale College

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