Upcoming school district primaries reflect Common Core’s growing stigma
All politics is local.
On June 24th of next week, 16 school district primaries will be held in Maryland and Utah, with 152 candidates vying for 44 seats. Alpine School District, the largest school district in Utah, has provided a glimpse into assessing the damage that support for Common Core State Standards–and in this case, alleged misconduct by the School Board against parents who oppose them–will be in future elections.
A report published June 17 by Ballotpedia highlights a lawsuit filed against the Board in February 2014 by parents of an 11-year-old child cites retaliation against the child for the parents’ reaching out to anti-Common Core group as they sought an “Individual Education Plan” for their child. According to Utahns against Common Core, this is the first lawsuit where Common Core is a participant.
Ballotpedia’s Nick Katers writes that the election has been “overshadowed” by the lawsuit controversy, in which the parents allege:
- Allegations of retaliation for utilizing professional help linked to “Anti-Common Core” advocacy.
- Allegations of unethical and invalid use of psychological testing to conform to predetermined outcome.
- Allegations of ignoring parent’s desperate pleas for assistance for son.
- Allegation of callous attitude towards parents as exhibited in 50 pages of “obtained” Alpine District inter-office/district emails.
When parents and teachers first began sounding the alarm about the abysmal Common Core federal overhaul of our heretofore state-based education system, it was hard to get even national legislators to take note of the most disquieting elements of the plan. For me, those include the removal of Euclidean geometry, cutting literature, cutting vocabulary acquisition, breathtaking amount of data collection on children and their parents, and the removal of the teacher’s ability to tailor education to the child.
Common Core advocates may have hoped they could fly under the radar–and have even deployed at minimum $200 million of the Gates Foundation‘s money to groups including “conservative” Arthur Brooks’s American Enterprise Institute, which received $1 million to fund their approval–but parents, teachers, and children keep thwarting their plans.
Just last week Reason reported on one classroom of 6th graders in Ipswich, MA, randomly selected as guinea pigs for testing the standardized tests, demanding compensation for the hours spent essentially product-testing for the nonprofit consortium running the process.
What the lawsuit in Utah reveals is exactly what Common Core advocates don’t want you to realize, just yet. That the role of parents in their children’s education necessarily is at odds with the federal standards. That any moves made to question Common Core may involve reciprocation against your child.
On the plus side, through this issue parents are being drawn into the public square like never before. If Common Core becomes a topic of conversation at every school board election, our children’s futures will be the better for it.
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
Anyone involved in a fight involving Common Core or education generally or the demonstrable ties to Agenda 21 please look at my book Published in October 2013 called Credentialed to Destroy: How and Why Education Became a Weapon. Chapter 7 explains what the actual, legally mandated, Common Core implementation really looks like, but the previous chapters rightfully ground this initiative as a renamed Outcomes Based Education. It explains the real purpose of Constructivism in education and how the reading or math and science wars were actually about eliminating content and the fluent ability to read print.
Because I am a lawyer my focus has always been on who has binding authority and what are they requiring and what have the leaders of these reforms said are their actual purposes. It is always about an admitted push towards an Economic Justice/Racial Equity/Planned Economy around Needs society.
If you are not familiar with my work this post illustrates the kind of decisive research I bring to any discussion before I talk about it. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/prescribing-racial-equity-outcomes-at-all-levels-of-social-interaction-wil-make-each-of-us-truly-bound-and-governed/
Both Utah and Maryland are states where OBE gained a foothold in the 90s that might get new names, but has never been relinquished. If Common Core is not grounded in its actual stated aims and provable history, this transformative coup is unstoppable. Everything has been put into place to achieve what Benjamin Barber calls Strong Democracy and Harry Boyte calls the cooperative commonwealth.
Leftists will advocate “local, local, local” when it comes to where their food comes from, or whether you shop at a nice little neighborhood business or a big, bad chain store. But that’s about the end of their affinity for localism. In everything else, they want a distant bureaucracy imposing uniform policies on everyone, not just nationally but even globally.
This is the sleeper issue for the 2014 and 2016 election cycles.