The story of Common Core and data mining begins as most stories do, with a huge, unmet need.
Self-appointed “stakeholder” know-it-alls at the federal level (also at state, corporate, and even university levels) determined that they had the right, and the need, for open access to personal student data– more so than they already had.
So, without waiting around for a proper vote, they did it. The CEDS (Common Education Data Standards) were created by the same people who created and copyrighted Common Core: the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO). No surprise.
…. The populist uprising against the national education standards is a dramatic and recent phenomenon, given that almost no one had even heard of Common Core until just two years ago. The standards were developed in 2009 by education policy bureaucrats at the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. President Obama’s Department of Education took an immediate interest, and the federal government encouraged state governors and legislatures to sign on to the standards by bribing them with Race to the Top grant money. This led 45 state governments to commit to Common Core implementation, even though hardly anyone knew what that would cost (lots of money) or require (retraining teachers, purchasing new technology).
Since then, the American people have had ample time to learn about Common Core—and the more they hear, the less they like it.
Fierce opposition to the standards is remarkably nonpartisan. Both conservative grassroots organizations and teachers unions are urging state legislatures to resist Core implementation. Thousands of parents and teachers have shown up to town hall meetings to demand that their school boards don’t hand over curriculum sovereignty to regional or federal education authorities…
..Homosexual teachers, school officials, and education activists (and their “allies”) — along with children as young as fifth grade — converged at GLSEN’s 2014 Annual Conferencein Boston last month. At this “hands-on” event they to introduced and discussed their latest strategies for thoroughly pushing homosexuality and transgender issues and behaviors into the minds of kids...
Eliza Byard, Executive Director of GLSEN, from New York, giving her keynote speech to the attendees.
But arguably the most powerful and compelling chart I’ve ever shared is on the topic of education. Prepared by my Cato colleague, Andrew Coulson, it shows that massive increases in spending and bureaucracy (which accompanied increasing federal involvement and intervention) have had zero impact on educational performance.
Keep that chart in the back of your mind as we consider what George Will has to say about President Obama’s scheme – known as Common Core – to expand federal involvement and intervention.
We have several excerpts, beginning with this passage outlining some of his concerns.
Common Core…is the thin end of an enormous wedge. It is designed to advance in primary and secondary education the general progressive agenda of centralization and uniformity. …proponents of the Common Core want its…
The fact that this sort of collectivist, progressive agitprop can be trotted out in open company, let alone on television by a major network, shows once again how far we have gone down into the moral shitter. h/t Liberty Blitzkrieg
This is such an incredibly creepy video it’s actually hard for me to believe it’s real. Professor of political science at Tulane University and MSNBC host, Melissa Harris-Perry states the following:
“…We have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families and recognize that kids belong to whole communities. Once it’s everyone’s responsibility, and not just the household’s, then we start making better investments.”
This clip is very important because it really demonstrates the mentality of a statist. They want to run your lives in every way you can possibly imagine, including the upbringing of your children. Outrageous.
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Now, call me a knuckle-dragging troglodyte for asking the obvious question, but, why does it seem that so many of these verbose, energetic progressive wack-jobs come from atypical home backgrounds? I.e. Of Melissa Harris-Perry (the hyphenation thing we’ll save for a later diatribe) Wikipedia reports:
…Melissa Victoria Harris was born in Seattle and grew up in the Virginia cities of Charlottesville and Chester, where she attended Thomas Dale High School. Part of a mixed family[citation needed], she is the youngest of five children. Her black father, William M. Harris Sr., was dean of Afro-American affairs at the University of Virginia, and her white mother, Diana Gray, taught at a community college and worked for nonprofits that helped poor communities.[3][4] Her mother was raised in a Mormon working-class family in a racially homogeneous neighborhood and went to college at Brigham Young University. After a failed first marriage, her mother left the LDS Church and was a single mother before she met Melissa’s father.[5] “I’ve never thought of myself as biracial,” Harris-Perry says. “I’m black.”[6] Harris-Perry’s family later became Unitarian Universalists.…”
OK, not horrific but a little weird, and not exactly what the majority of Americans were reared under either. Similarly with Barak Obama, or Elena Kagan, or Sonya Sotomayor, and on and on and on. Thus I believe that progressivism may have at its core a psychological foundation rooted in a home life that was too far outside the bell curve, or at least far enough beyond the normal range of the human developmental experience for a more ‘normal’ world view to obtain in adulthood.
They took prayer out of the schools. We grumbled, but did nothing. They took George Washington’s portrait out of the classrooms. We grumbled, but did nothing. They started teaching collective socialist doctrine to our children. We grumbled, but did nothing.
They started awarding trophies to every player in school team sports, winners and losers. They replaced health classes with sex education, and taught it to grade school children. They promoted failing students in the name of self esteem. We grumbled, but did nothing… Continue reading →
The Eurovision Song Contest doesn’t get a lot of attention in the United States, but on the Continent it’s long been seen as the perfect Euro-metaphor.
Years before the euro came along, it was the prototype pan-European institution, and predicated on the same assumptions. Eurovision took the national cultures that produced Mozart, Vivaldi and Debussy, and in return gave us “Boom-Bang-A-Bang” (winner, 1969), “Ding-Ding-A-Dong” (winner, 1975) and “Diggi-Loo-Diggi-Ley” (winner, 1984).
The euro took the mark, the lira and the franc, and merged them to create the “Boom-Bang-A-Bang” of currencies.
How will it all end? One recalls the 1990 Eurovision finals in Zagreb: “Yugoslavia is very much like an orchestra,” cooed the hostess, Helga Vlahovi?. “The string section and the wood section all sit together.”
Shortly thereafter, the wood section began ethnically cleansing the dressing rooms, while the string section rampaged through the brass section pillaging their instruments and severing their genitals. Indeed, the charming Miss Vlahovic herself was forced into a sudden career shift and spent the next few years as Croatian TV’s head of “war information” programming. Continue reading →
The Eurovision Song Contest doesn’t get a lot of attention in the United States, but on the Continent it’s long been seen as the perfect Euro-metaphor.
The Grey Enigma 