Interviews

Peeling Back the Onion on What The Common Core Really Is – With Sam Sorbo

By Alice Linahan January 2015
I had a great time on the Sam Sorbo show this morning peeling back the onion on what the Common Core really is. Below is the information that I mentioned on Sam’s show. 

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As Robin Eubanks, author of Credentialed to destroy, has stated: “Common Core is really just a ruse to jettison the traditional role of high school and force the School to Work vision that was so controversial in the 90s.” 

What has changed from the ’90s is the enormous amount of private data on our children and their teachers that is the new currency in the 21st Century education. 

Texas we have a problem~ I thought we said NO to the Federal Government when it comes to the Common Core Philosophy of Education? Oh but wait…

Here is a little inside info from Anita Hoge that may just surprise Parents, Grandparents and Tax Payers. 

“Below is a link to retrieve your state contracts for your state longitudinal data system. This link will give you access to your state grant with the National Center for Education Statistics so that you can see how your particular state fits into the national data collection scheme. Each state can find their grant at the link below. You can identify how your state established a “national unique ID” for each and every student in your state. You can connect the “womb to workplace” data system and prove how this workforce data collection tracks individuals, including wages. Your “national unique ID” identifies your child through mazes of data trafficking that is supplied to the federal government. Outside contractors have access to personally identifiable information on your family for free.

Please see the link below. Scroll down to your state. Click on your state. Click on each of the PDF’s under each grant application. In some instances there are more than one. Enjoy!

National Center for Education Statistics Grants for State Longitudinal Data Systems

Texas Took the Money ~http://nces.ed.gov/programs/slds/state.asp?stateabbr=TX 

Texas Longitudinal Data Base System

President Obama’s Executive Order (EO 12866) has allowed personally identifiable information to be collected, dispersed for research, and given to third party contractors by “unlocking” the Family Education Rights in Privacy Act, FERPAYour state is no exceptionThis is the collection of information on your “whole child.” If your child is about 28 years or younger, they have a national ID and a federal dossier. This data system has been announced by the National Assessment of Educational Progress as a prototype for a new kind of Census – a psychometric dossier, on every child, adolescent, and adult including information on their child’s attitudes, values, opinions, and beliefs, “womb to workplace.”

The three following federal initiatives have nationalized education in the United States which were initiated without the authorization of Congress and done by Presidential Executive Order or by fiat through Secretary of Education Duncan:

  1. The Common Core copyright that standardized a “model” curriculum and standardized the standards in a 50 state strategy creating a national curriculum and a national test.
  2. The “unlocking” of data through FERPA opening the floodgates of personally identifiable information (PII data) to be released to researchers, foundations, testing companies, curriculum and software designers, etc., and allowing the identification of individuals in a longitudinal data bank housed in the National Center of Education Statistics with a “national unique ID.” The data system will be used to monitor compliance to Common Core birth through retirement, called a student “snapshot.”
  3. ESEA ~ The illegal waiver for the Elementary and Secondary Education Act Flexibility Waiver, the Flex Waiver for No Child Left Behind lowers poverty guidelines to 0% so that ALL children would qualify for Common Core remediation under Title I that blankets a school. It changes the funding criteria of Title I to follow the child. It initiates teacher evaluations and teacher training to monitor whether teachers are teaching Common Core. And it expands Common Core to include dispositions, non-academic standards, and social and emotional learning in the affective domain, which are attitudes, values, opinions, and beliefs referred to as character or grit.

    Remediation or Interventions in Your “Whole Child”

    By using Special Education funds called IDEA (Individuals With Disabilities Education Act), the interventions in Common Core – both “academic and behavioral” remediation of individual students – are used to be sure each student achieves these Government desired attitudes and values. These interventions are called Response to Interventions, or RTI or multi-tiered system of support. This is the real issue of government interventions into the thoughts, feelings, attitudes, dispositions, and beliefs of American children. By using Special Education teams that are funded to go into the regular classroom they will screen ALL students. The controlled literacy piece of this agenda uses behavioral scripts, researched from BF Skinner’s operant conditioning and individually prescribed instruction, programmed into computer courses, to prepare the future workforce for “functional” literacy. This is the science-based research that the government touts as being “effective.” Parents are not truthfully informed of this process, and the behavioral interventions will proceed on ALL students without your knowledge and without parental consent. Your child will be observed, screened, tested, remediated, and repeated until they meet the government Common Core Standards. Period.

    This is NOT the Special Education that you think it is. This is NOT about an IEP. This has nothing to do with truly educating your child. It’s mental health screening, America. This data is being fed into state and national data banks as soon as your child is identified with a “national unique ID.” Where your state is in the process will depend on when your state applied for these federal grants in order to come up to speed with the technology and teacher training. The Early Learning grants identify infants and pre-schoolers, and also mandate screening the social and emotional development or affective domain.

    This psychological or mental health data on personalities, attitudes, values, opinions, beliefs, and social and emotional learning that a teacher is subjectively monitoring is scored on a template. The intervention team sets up a plan to remediate your child’s values, opinions, or beliefs. What are the government’s criteria for interpersonal skills, or values, or attitudes? How will proficiency be attained? How do you measure a proficiency in “cooper-ability” in toddlers?

PARENTS ARE YOU REALLY OKAY WITH THIS!!  REMEMBER IN TEXAS WE PASSED HB2103 

Tracking and trafficking of this personal and sensitive “snapshot” of your student is digitized into a state data warehouse relayed to the federal data warehouse. This data can be released to outside contractors through written agreements between state departments of education. This “snapshot” of your child reveals all mental, health, and physical aspects of your “whole child.” This is unconstitutional and these Civil Rights issues remain to be pursued. All three federal actions were done without the authorization of Congress and deceptively initiated through presidential fiat. These three federal initiatives have effectually nationalized education in the United States, mandating that individuals meet the nationalized Common Core Standards.

Data is the “new” currency. The trafficking of this data into the hands of corporate America represents the biggest redistribution of wealth – stolen from middle class America – that this country has ever known. All these researchers, corporations, foundations, businesses, and universities – i.e., Carnegie Foundation, Gates Foundation, Annenberg, Microsoft, Google, Walmart, Cisco, Pearson, ACT, McGraw Hill, ETS, Amazon, University of Pennsylvania, Carnegie Mellon, Penn State, etc., etc., etc.,– are able to access this data for free! Your hard earned tax money is paying for every stroke on the computer in this data collection. Every data transfer; every textbook, curriculum, lesson plan; all research developed on ‘how to’ psychological techniques and conditioning processes; hardware, software, rewiring of schools, computersiPads, Internet services, digital technology devices, phone apps, code books; every test, all embedded assessments into the curriculum; teacher training, teacher evaluations; data analysts, computer programmers; research in biometric data, every state longitudinal data warehouse, every federal data warehouse, every computer transaction and everything about Common Core… has been paid for by you! Your child’s future is being stolen and sold. I hope that makes you mad. You are paying for it.

 

IN TEXAS THROUGH HB2103 Three centers for education research (CER’s) will be set up to conduct research using the data from the TEA, THECB, and TWC that goes back at least 20 years.

The data will be known as the P-20/Workforce Data Repository and will be operated by the Higher Education Coordinating Board.

The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board will establish three centers for education research (CER’s) to conduct studies and share education data, including college admission tests and data from the National Student Clearinghouse. 

Interesting to note Abbott’s appointments to the “UT Board of Regents announced on Thursday is Sara Martinez Tucker, the CEO of the National Math and Science Initiative. Writing in US News and World Report in February of 2014, she praised the controversial Common Core initiative being promoted by the Obama Administration.

Sara Martinez Tucker Sara Martinez Tucker
“We should move the discussion to ‘how’ Common Core will be implemented – not ‘if’ Common Core should be implemented,” she wrote.”

Did you know~ via Robin Eubanks, author of Credentialed to Destroy

“The language from the ESEA (Elementary and Secondary Education Act) rewrite on closing the achievement gaps between groups that objectively have had very different life experiences basically limits what can now go on in a K-12 classroom in any state or locality. Some local control, huh? Interestingly the only kind of education that will now suffice is precisely the same as what political and social transformationalists intent on social justice also want. It’s the same kind of K-12 education that members of the Chamber of Commerce also endorse since it makes genuine, shift the paradigm invention and technology far less likely.”

 

Are you really okay with the Federal Government in bed with State Government managing the Talent Pipeline?  Basically our children are human capital for those in power.  Here is a report prepared by the US Chamber of Commerce for a November 19, 2014 national conference in DC to sell its “New Approach to Managing the Skills Gap.” The idea is to partner with “employers in regions and communities across the country to advance talent supply chain solutions.” Employers are now to be treated as the end-customer of the K-12 and higher education systems. That document calls on employers to take the initiative in “championing a new vision for employer engagement with education and workforce systems.”  

This is the 3rd radical education reform in the US which seeks to shift education in America from an Education of Opportunity based on academics – reading, writing, math and history (Equal Opportunity) to an education of Equity based on – Attitudes, Values and Beliefs. (Equal Outcomes). The question then becomes whose attitudes, values and beliefs? If the New College Board owned AP Advanced Placement English 3 framework and national assessment are any indication, it is not pro-America or pro-capitalism.  

 

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