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Common Core textbook exec blasts dead white male Founders

Common Core textbook exec blasts dead white male Founders

. . . and damns the Second Amendment

Common Core education standards, which use the “Race to the Top” grant program to enjoin states to adopt national education standards, is the mechanism through which the federal government is taking control over K-12 curriculum.

Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) recently referred to it as the “Obamacare of education.” From Cato’s Neal McCluskey:

…While Washington did not outright order states to adopt the Core, it did require that they promise to adopt standards common to a majority of states — a description fit only by the Core — to get maximum points in the $4 billion Race to the Top competition, held at the nadir of the Great Recession.

After the vast majority of states had made that promise — but many had not won money — the Obama administration declared that, to get waivers from the hated No Child Left Behind Act, they would have to either adopt the Core most had already promised to use, or standards certified “college- and career-ready” by a public university system.

Washington also selected and paid for Core-aligned tests — including the Smarter Balanced assessment used by California — that would be plugged into NCLB’s testing requirements.

So Core adoption was not imposed by federal fiat, but was coerced using money taxpayers had no choice but to give, and rules to escape parts of a despised, punitive federal education law. Well-informed people could easily see that as de facto federal imposition.

Common Core standards, adopted in the majority of U.S. states, have been exposed as pernicious for numerous reasons: staggering inadequacy, altering the mission of public education from a liberal arts education to job training, the dumbing down of curricula, the progressive philosophy it imparts, an onerous test-taking burden, massive data-mining, and a seedy beginning (including help from Jeb Bush). The Pioneer Institute has exhaustive resources on these concerns on their website.

But until now we hadn’t gotten to know the rank-and-file characters that are Common Core.

James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas published this Thursday the third in a series of undercover videos featuring textbook publishing executives and officials belittling and ridiculing the students for whom their books are made and the illusion that Common Core is about **the children**.

The textbook publishing industry, which has been inching toward monopoly status due to UK-owned Pearson’s buying spree, profits off of the Common Core’s ever-changing standards that require school districts in states adopting the standards to purchase, and re-purchase, textbooks to keep up with the curricula sent to them from on high. You may hear the retort that Common Core isn’t setting curriculum, it’s just setting the standards — gauged via test — but in order to conform to the tests, the curriculum is changed.

As a result of Project Veritas’s first two videos, in which textbook publisher executives laughed about making money off of schools and joked, “I hate kids. I’m in it to sell books, don’t even kid yourself for a heartbeat.” and “You don’t think that the educational publishing companies are in it for education, do you? No, they’re in it for the money,” two executives were terminated.

Interestingly, critics of the first videos, including Daily Caller (??), say it’s not exactly a “smoking gun”: we already know about the big money involved and of course textbook companies are all about the money. Even the uber-lefty Center for Media and Democracy reported on the cronyism cash-cow that is Common Core, with respect to contracts for the testing it entails.

I asked O’Keefe for his response to these accusations. According to him:

Houghton Mifflin fired the second official after she says they use taxpayer dollars to “slap a new name on” the same book and “sell a shit ton.” It’s compulsory, so it’s not exactly just free-market profiting. This second official was fired after the first official was openly talking about how much she hates kids. This is an effort to enrich cronies instead of enriching the lives of children. Those are not our words. Those are their words.

If these previous videos exposed the flippancy of mission and disdain for subject matter that Common Core’s textbook profiters, the most recent video, released Thursday, reveals exactly what philosophy is driving Common Core.

The third video features Kim Koerber, currently with National Geographic publishing and formerly with Common-Core publisher Pearson. Among her comments:

  • “The dead white guys did not create this country. It was a whole bunch of different kinds of people. And yes there were women, and yes there were people of color, and yes…you need to talk about them too. But they want to talk about those dead white guys.”
  • “So, I think the progressive bias is the more educated you are, the better you are, and the conservative bias is the less they know the better they are going to be. Yeah.”
  • “They don’t agree with Islam, so they don’t want their kids to be taught it. They don’t agree with birth control so they don’t want their kids to talk about it. They don’t agree with math because they don’t understand it. It’s not the same math they did in high school. So they don’t want their kids to know about it.”
  • “It’s conservative push back, that, they are afraid. So these conservative, these conservative voters are afraid of everything.”
  • “They’re misunderstanding; they are people that don’t really know what they are talking about. I…I can’t stand it. If they talk to me one more time about…climate change not being real, I’m just gonna scream.”
  • “But yet they don’t want to teach all of it. Damn the Second Amendment. I don’t think personal handguns need to be on anyone except the government, the police. What is the purpose of having a gun?”

These are the folks in charge of, and profiting from, the federal takeover of education.

Oh, and in case you had it in mind to home-school, ensure you aren’t purchasing Pearson’s new line of home-school textbooks.

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Comments

“They’re misunderstanding; they are people that don’t really know what they are talking about. I…I can’t stand it. If they talk to me one more time about…climate change not being real, I’m just gonna scream.”

Yes, yes. THERE’S a real “science” believer…!!!

I know it’s bad of me, but I personally would LIKE to see her hair on fire.

    legacyrepublican in reply to Ragspierre. | January 23, 2016 at 7:17 pm

    Equally absurd is her fixation on prostitutes in the video too when it comes to Texas history.

    In 1880 Red River Junction, Texas, the main crossing of the Chisholm Trail into Oklahoma, lived my great great grandfather with his wife and three kids plus his wife’s brothers. And, guess what. Those kids went to school too.

    My ancestor was a drover on the trail along with his brothers in law.

    According to this lady ( using the term loosely I might add ), my great great grandfather was into whoring and had no family values at all.

    But, then again, I am just a Texas white guy Republican who doesn’t know his own history. ( there is a reason I am a “legacy” Republican )

    I know it’s bad of me, but I think her pants ought to be on fire too.

Char Char Binks | January 23, 2016 at 7:31 pm

“The dead white guys did not create this country. It was a whole bunch of different kinds of people…” The country was already here before any people. It takes people, or a people, to create a nation. And it may not be to her liking, but it was dead white guys who came up with the ideas, the ideals, of freedom, democracy, rule of law, and rights. Those men weren’t perfect, but we’d still be waiting for those things if they’d left it up to POC to develop them.

““They don’t agree with Islam, so they don’t want their kids to be taught it.”
Teaching Islam is endorsing Islam, a violation of the 1st Amendment.

“They don’t agree with math because they don’t understand it.”
I understand math fairly well.
“It’s not the same math they did in high school.”
It’s not math, it’s make work and dumbing down the kids.

    DaveGinOly in reply to genes. | January 23, 2016 at 11:54 pm

    I think Sir Isaac Newton would be surprised to learn that our math is different from his math. Does “different” math lead to different results? If not, what’s “different” about it?

    nordic_prince in reply to genes. | January 24, 2016 at 1:36 am

    I too understand math rather well, and the crap they push as math in Common Core is not designed to prepare any students for STEM careers. It’s designed to make kids innumerate and make math seem mysterious and/or scary ~

      The Friendly Grizzly in reply to nordic_prince. | January 24, 2016 at 12:50 pm

      Even in my day (I started Kindergarten in 1953) arithmetic and math instruction was horrible. Subtraction was a mystery to me until my mother showed me the method she learned in New York schools in the mid 1920s. It all fell into place and I was cranking out correct answers left and right. I also received “F” grades because I did not use the method being taught.

      The dumbing-down steps have been in place for decades.

DINORightMarie | January 23, 2016 at 8:12 pm

It’s horrifying how bad Common Core is. Jeb! and many others defend it, and that is a red flag that they are progressives who want our children to be raised as “educated idiots” – thinking they know when they are both ignorant and intentionally dumb.

The AP US History (APUSH) was revised to such a point that it is almost void of our nation’s history.

Arne Duncan and the left want our children to be raised as good little lemmings who have no ability to comprehend why our nation ever was allowed to exist.

And they’ve been at it since Billy Ayers and his lot have been able to get to them.

An absolute abhorrence of truth is the prerequisite for teaching/promoting Common Core. This revulsion is directed into a sheer hatred of all humans ala the climate change meme and at certain humans ala the rewriting of history with an identity politics pen.

Science is already submersed in a current of untruth with the political scientism of global warming. Math will follow. 1 + 1 will soon also equal 3 because 3 is more inclusive than 2. How else do you think the CC teachers will get the ‘subdued’ students to bypass critical thinking and enter the world of moral relativism where Queen Bees (the elite) dictate the ‘rules’.

Common core IS the Progressive agenda for creating dumbed-down worker bees necessary to build the growing Collective of the U.S.S.R. or Union of Schooled Socialist Republics

Get your down thumbs ready. The CCSS cover only Math and English Language Arts. There is nothing in them about climate change, history, the 2A, or most of the other criticisms I hear. Please, read them. http://www.corestandards.org/read-the-standards/. Now, tell me exactly which ones you disagree with. This one:
Perform arithmetic operations on polynomials.
CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.HSA.APR.A.1
Understand that polynomials form a system analogous to the integers, namely, they are closed under the operations of addition, subtraction, and multiplication; add, subtract, and multiply polynomials.

This one?
Craft and Structure:
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RH.11-12.4
Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including analyzing how an author uses and refines the meaning of a key term over the course of a text (e.g., how Madison defines faction in Federalist No. 10).

I understand that curricula developed to address the CCSS may be controversial, but that is a different argument. For the record, Houghton Mifflin is a competitor, not a part of Pearson (as implied), nor is Pearson making any money off of CCSS.

This is where the action is – almost everything else is a distraction.

This is the number one reason not to support Jeb Bush.

It’s time to implement the separation of school and state. It starts one parent at a time.

Malachi 5:5 “Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet Before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord.
6 And he will turn The hearts of the fathers to the children, And the hearts of the children to their fathers, Lest I come and strike the earth with a curse.”

Regarding the U.S. Constitution:

“But yet they don’t want to teach all of it. Damn the Second Amendment.”

But the Second Amendment is part of “all of it”, and disagreeing with part of it and suppressing discussion of it because of personally held viewpoints by all parties is the great bulk of the problem here.

Why should we trust someone whose knowledge of the “Wild West” period is limited to what episodes of “Gunsmoke” that she saw?

Common core math teaching methods were designed with the sole purpose of providing research papers for educators who don’t understand math. They are experimenting on our children’s math education and the result will be just as bad as the “new math” that destroyed a generations math education.

The history/social studies common core is a way to formalize teaching of progressive fascist ideology to all students. Under lying it all is that the founders of our country were evil and that makes our country evil. We need to fundamentally change our country because of that and replace it with the progressive fascist utopia.

This utopia has the progressive fascists ruling a one party state and through it controlling every aspect of a society without liberty. This utopia is identical in every significant respect to the utopias created by Nazis, Communists and Muslims whenever the take power. It would be just as evil also.