What is Common Core?

[Reaganchick]

They r trying to push it back in several states now. Contact ur state reps (after u arm ur self with info ammo) and demand that it be rolled back. Michelle malkin's website has a series of really good articles on it. As bad as the curriculum is it is being used as an end run around around local control- it will be another top down forced program. Bill ayers is the author/promoter so that should tell u a good bit.

[Anna]

I was just about to post info about this, as I hadn't seen it mentioned much on this forum. Yes, Michelle Malkin has an ongoing series of articles about this called "Rotten to the Core" which are a must-read:

Rotten to the Core - Part 1: Obama's War on Academic Standards

Rotten to the Core - Part 2: Readin', Writin' and Deconstructionism

Rotten to the Core - Part 3: Lessons from Texas and the Growing Grassroots Revolt

Rotten to the Core - Part 4: The Feds' Invasive Student Tracking Database

Rotten to the Core: Reader Feedback from the Frontlines

And new from her today:

Common Core as Trojan Horse

National Review - Michelle Malkin
3/15/13

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.

[Pebbles2]

I work for a public school district in Arizona. Arizona is transitioning to the Common Core standards. All public schools throughout America have some type of curriculum standards they have to adhere to. These standards the state require of public schools seems to change every four years or so.

I believe the more serious issue is something that no one really knows about, called, in Arizona,- The Student-Teacher-Course-Connection. All public schools who received "Race to the Top" funding were required to have this in place by December 2012. Millions of dollars were invested on a state level into this new software program.

What this does is gives the state and the feds the ability to track any student with the student's individual ID #, preschool through 12th grade, where little Johnnie was for every period of the day, the teachers name with the teachers individual ID#, the subject, if a substitute was used in the class, etc. The student's ID is tied to all the students demographic info and behavior reports. The tentacles spread far and wide with all the data collected from public schools. Schools in AZ are also required to weight all the students and report this info.

Next year our teachers salary will be directly tied to this student information. More and more local control of our schools is being removed.

[Lenno]

Jeb Bush loves Common Core

[Crash_Test_Dhimmi]

I have a moderate income, but my wife insists on us living paycheck to paycheck just so my son can go to a private school. It is money well spent

[chel0524]

I teach at a (thankfully) private Christian school. In my first grade class, I teach my students to measure using inches and centimeters. We can read almost any book by the end of the school year, can do double digit addition of multiple numbers, double digit subtraction, add simple fractions, know numerous things about the founding of country and our presidents and I could go on and on with what they know by the end of the school year.

I am working on my masters degree and sometimes have to submit lesson plans for an assignment. I continually have to dumb them down to get them to pass my professors requirements. For instance, here in Kentucky our common core standards require first graders to measure using non-standard units. What does that mean? It means forget using inches and centimeters and try seeing how many hands long your desk is. How many paperclips long your paper is. It's the absolute stupidest thing I've ever seen.

[Snowbandit]

Another excellent article on Common-Core.

http://www.newswithviews.com/Thompson/mary102.htm