More Stand Up Against Common Core!

This lady eviscerates Common Core in 3 minutes! It is ridiculous to think that our kids have to be exposed to this. And don't buy the excuse that state legislature is making changes, they don't have they education to make changes and they are only promising that to calm the "few" until all is forgotten and things settle back down. In other words, until the sheep are orderly again, believing anything that comes down from the top. It is like so many who hang their very life on every word of their doctor, when most of the time their doctor is just guessing and taking pot shots at a diagnosis. Copy this into you browser and watch this young woman decimate the smug proponents of Common Core! http://www.bizpacreview.com/2013/12/18/arkansas-mom-destroys-common-core-in-four-powerful-minutes-89152

MODERN CHAOS

This is the learning environment for hundreds of thousands of students in American schools today. Utter chaos: Disrespect for teachers and disrespect for each other: Secret bullying, stealing clothes, pencils, food and threatening family: Campus fights nearly everyday: Never knowing when one of those dramas will turn into a gun battle: A classroom noise level that is unbelievable: Great grades given if you are a favorite student: Extra points given that you didn't earn: Report cards revealing a child's true progress? No! Parents are so deceived by report cards today. Is this what you want your child to grow up in? Learning will not be the priority I can assure you. Academics are only a shadow, and a faint one, in schools today. The only way change will happen is when massive numbers of parents pull their children out of brick and mortar schools, form co-ops, whatever it takes, and teach their own precious children and school them in a wholesome value system which this country is sorely lacking. If you can't teach, then let internet videos do it for you. There are many free sites and resources. If you can afford it, place them in a small home school; one that doesn't operate on the herd learning mentality.(This eliminates many private schools-as most of them have adopted the disaster that is Common Core). The result will be a better educated student who feels loved instead of daily rejection and manipulation. Then the fun club that American education has become will come tumbling down, just like her international averages have come tumbling down until she is lower than Zimbabwe in some subjects! If you love your children, you will extricate them from the train wreck of MODERN CHAOS - American Education - while it is still legal to do so.

CREEPY COMMON CORE!

by Michele Malkin Last week, I reported on the federal government’s massive new student-tracking database, which was created as part of the nationalized Common Core standards scheme. The bad news: GOP “leadership” continues to ignore or, worse, enable this Nanny State racket. (Hello, Jeb Bush.) The good news: A grassroots revolt outside the Beltway bubble is swelling. Families are taking their children’s academic and privacy matters out of the snoopercrats’ grip and into their own hands. You can now download a Common Core opt-out form to submit to your school district, courtesy of the group Truth in American Education. Parents caught off guard by the stealthy tracking racket are now mobilizing across the country. According to the New York Daily News, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, echoing parents across New York City, blasted the tracking database in a letter to government officials: “I don’t want my kids’ privacy bought and sold like this.” This Wednesday, prompted by parental objections, Oklahoma state representatives unanimously passed House Bill 1989 — the Student Data Accessibility, Transparency and Accountability Act — to prohibit the release of confidential student data without the written consent of the student’s parent or guardian. As I noted in last week’s column, the national Common Core student database was funded with Obama stimulus money. Grants also came from the liberal Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (which largely underwrote and promoted the top-down Common Core curricular scheme). A division of the conservative Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. built the database infrastructure. A nonprofit startup, “inBloom, Inc.,” evolved out of this strange-bedfellows partnership to operate the invasive database, which is compiling everything from health-care histories, income information, and religious affiliations to voting status, blood types, and homework completion. And it gets worse. Research fellow Joy Pullmann at the Heartland Institute points to a February Department of Education report on its data-mining plans that contemplates the use of creepy student-monitoring techniques such as “functional magnetic resonance imaging” and “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 DOE report exposes the big lie that Common Core is about raising academic standards. The report instead reveals Common Core’s progressive designs to measure and track children’s “competencies” in “recognizing bias in sources,” “flexibility,” “cultural awareness and competence,” “appreciation for diversity,” “empathy,” “perspective taking, trust, [and] service orientation.” That’s right. School districts and state governments are pimping out highly personal data on children’s feelings, beliefs, “biases,” and “flexibility” instead of doing their own jobs of imparting knowledge — and minding their own business. And yes, Republicans such as former Florida governor Jeb Bush continue to falsely defend the centralized Common Core regime as locally driven and non-coercive, while ignoring the database system’s circumvention of federal student-privacy laws. Why? Edu-tech nosybodies are using the Common Core assessment boondoggle as a Trojan horse to collect and crunch massive amounts of personal student data for their own social-justice or moneymaking ends. Reminder: Nine states have entered into contracts with inBloom: Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New York, and North Carolina. Countless other vendors are salivating at the business possibilities in exploiting public-school students. Google, for example, is peddling its Gmail platform to schools in a way that will allow it to harvest and access families’ information and preferences — which can then be sold in advertising profiles to marketers. The same changes to the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) of 1974 (also known as the Buckley Amendment, after its sponsor, Senator James L. Buckley) that paved the way for the Common Core tracking scheme also opened up private student information to Google. As FERPA expert Sheila Kaplan explains it, “Students are paying the cost to use Google’s ‘free’ servers by providing access to their sensitive data and communications.” It’s a Big Brother gold rush and an educational Faustian bargain. Fortunately, there is a way out. It starts with parents’ reasserting their rights, protecting their children, and adopting that motto from the Reagan years: Just say no.