Tags
Arne Duncan, Common Core, Glenn Beck, Hillary Clinton, Lt. Governor Dan Forest, Mitch Daniels, Parents, Race to the Top, Schools. Local School Board, Tony Bennett
The debate raging in Indiana over the implementation of Common Core is enough to make one’s head spin!
It’s a Democrat imperative at the Federal level which recycles a decades-old, top-down approach to education. Its roots are in a letter sent to Hillary Clinton by Marc Tucker, president of the National Center on Education and the Economy, after Bill Clinton’s presidential victory in 1992. The letter laid out a plan “to remold the entire American system” into a centralized one where curriculum and “job matching” will be handled by government functionaries. Introduced by Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education, in a 2009 speech to the National Press Club, Common Core was quickly adopted by Republican Governors, like Mitch Daniels, at the State levels. Historically, and based on the two parties’ platforms, the two should never come together. Why then is Common Core their “common core?”
Republicans have always promoted smaller government and local control. Common Core offers neither. Democrats have historically promoted social equality and equal access. Common Core offers neither.
President Barack Obama and Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education, announce Race-to-the-Top, an education reform backed by historic levels of financial support — $4.35 billion in discretionary funds.
One could understand that cash-strapped states had no choice but to try to win Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s Race-to-the-Top, with the funds promised to pour into state education coffers upon successfully agreeing to all of its stipulations. But that does not account for the relish and rigor with which Republicans Daniels and Tony Bennet, Indiana School Superintendent, (and their Doppelgangers in other states) embraced Common Core. Tony Bennett was literally salivating at the prospect of winning a spot in Race-to-the-Top. He demanded that the Indiana State Teacher’s Association immediately support five key principles of Indiana’s Race-to-the-Top application which created a highly public feud between Bennett and Indiana’s teachers’ unions.
Bennett and Daniels, as well as the other Republican governors across the country, broke from traditional Republican ideology to accept Common Core which an article in The New American magazine, “Common Core: A Scheme to Rewrite Education” describes as “being foisted on state governments all across the country with a combination of taxpayer-funded bribes and outright deception”. Another article by Ann Kline in American Thinker titled “Everything You Wanted to Ask About Common Core and More”, explains how Common Core utilizes intrusive student data-mining and that the educational reformers pushing Common Core, including both Democrats and Republicans — thank you, Jeb Bush — are lying when they say that the standards are state-based, state-led, and voluntary. In this article, Kline speaks of Lieutenant Governor Dan Forest of North Carolina. Mr. Forest wrote well-researched questions about Common Core to his state’s Department of Public Instruction….200 of them! (Read Lt. Governor’s letter to the North Carolina Department of Education, HERE.) Lt. Governor Forest also questioned the premise of Common Core at a press conference. Then, there is Glenn Beck’s coming out against Common Core on his radio program, his television program and in his writings.
In short, we have state level Republicans, going against their party’s ingrained ideology by accepting Common Core, which is a Federal level Democrat imperative that will negate traditional Democrat ideology. So, blind allegiance to ideology doesn’t explain why Common Core is crashing in on us. None of the people who are pushing it at the Federal or State levels are truly educators, so it’s not for educational purposes that it is being foisted on us. That also makes it impossible to believe that it is for the “Good of the children.”
So, why are we labeled “Conspiracy Theorists” because we believe there are selfish, power-grabbing, and, most likely, financial reasons that Common Core is being pushed upon us?
