The Tenth Amendment of the United States Bill of Rights is clear enough. "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." In other words, the law confirms that education is NOT a responsibility of the federal government; it is "reserved to the States respectively or to the people." This Amendment redefines the relationship to avoid all misunderstanding or illegal encroachment of power. Why? Because our Founding Fathers feared that the new or any future national government might seek to exercise powers it was not granted, and the states might not be able to fully exercise their reserved power, which is the case today.
Fast forward to the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI), a U.S. education enterprise that is requiring states to surrender their diverse curricula for one set of educational principles (under one government umbrella) thereby undermining individuality, limiting quality and parental choices, and it is unconstitutional when put under federal government control. CCSSI is financed by private organizations in Washington, DC, with extravagant funding by the Gates Foundation to support a leftist agenda. The federal Department of Education instituted a (problematic) Race-to-the-Top competition to impose Standards on the states, using a campaign that deceitfully presents the program as state-led and voluntary. Remember that the Department of Education was created under Carter as payoff to the National Education Association (NEA, a union) for supporting his election.
Despite the aforementioned funding, the Washington State Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction estimates an implementation cost of $300 million; California expects their costs to be $759 million; Texans expect theirs to be $100 million by 2015 with another $1.2 billion to be paid to Pearson, the publisher, for developing standardized tests and other materials -- a huge expense (and enormous corporate profit) for no improvements.
The Standards are owned and copyrighted by private businesses, nongovernmental agents that are unaccountable to parents and students. The "architect of Common Core," David Coleman, motivated by his Marxist agenda, turned the education system into an "engine of social justice" to repair the alleged "massive social injustice in this country." And Bill Gates's millions are committed to develop, promote, and fund the leftist indoctrination to create activists for the socialism agenda.
If education is nationalized like our healthcare, it will eliminate local control and impose one-size-fits-all instruction that will affect all schooling -- public, private and homeschoolers. Without parental input and as teachers are forced to comply with federal standards, so will go innovation to meet individual students' needs. And, the more control accorded the teachers' unions, the less control accorded the teachers over their classrooms.
Good education policies recognize students' individuality, disparate learning styles, preferences and paces, and modification requirements, but Common Core is a rigid education policy that handles all children indiscriminately, while impairing their creativity and learning.
Race-to-the-Top Grants were offered to states whose schools conformed in four areas: 1) adopting the standards, 2) building data systems that measure students' compliance and conformance, 3) recruiting and rewarding effective teachers and principals, and 4) rewarding the lowest-achieving school districts for improvement.
Under the Race to the Top program, teachers will receive salaries based on students' test score gains. This could encourage teachers to lower the standards to help their students meet goals, and have students memorize to pass standardized tests rather than learn and think critically (not unlike the failed "No Child Left Behind" program). To achieve high scores, schools could also become more selective in their admissions. As with other centralized programs, it rejects individuality and creativity, and despite the current sales pitch, diversity will be sacrificed for conformity.
And how about the states with advanced standards? Sandra Stotsky, a professor at the University of Arkansas who served on the committee to validate Common Core standards, said, "The standards dumb American education down by about two grades' worth." Centralized education programs have been tried and they never worked.
The data-mining system, run by the Department of Labor, violates students' lifelong privacy by tracking test scores, academic progress, and information on religion, political beliefs, sexual behavior and attitudes, and more. Under current consideration is the use of Galvanic Skin Response bracelets (which detect and register changes in skin's ability to conduct electricity, caused by an emotional stimulus) to measure effective teachers, at $15 million to Harvard for education policy research and $1 million to the national PTA. The tracking will result in evaluation and guidance into two- or four-year colleges or trade schools, then into the workforce, in direct conflict with our right to our pursuit of happiness.
Further, Common Core Initiative Standards has been linked with our Department of Defense and "Connect All Schools" in an effort to create The One World Curriculum, where students and teachers connect with the world through two programs: Culture & Global Issues Reflection Program and The One World Curriculum (yes, George Soros' One World Order). Iranian-born Vartan Gregorian, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) and President Obama's White House Fellowship, former president of Brown University and current president of Carnegie Corporation, is a board member of The Qatar Foundation International (QFI).
Qatar is an Islamic regime that is home to Al-Jazeera and is reviving its Wahhabi heritage. The Brotherhood-affiliated QFI, based in Washington, DC, partnered with the US Departments of State and Education in accordance with Obama's 2009 speech in Cairo, "to create a new online network, so a young person in Kansas can communicate instantly with a young person in Cairo." QFI has already awarded ample curriculum grants to seven US schools that accepted an Arabic-language curriculum; connected 100 US schools via Skype, and has a stated goal of connecting every US school with the (Muslim) world by 2016.
Vartan Gregorian is the author of "Islam, A Mosaic, Not a Monolith," which confirms the Islamist goal of world domination. In the chapter "Islamism: Liberation Politics," he quotes Ayatolah Khomeini: "Islam does not conquer. Islam wants all countries to become Muslim, of themselves." He endorses a "theo-democracy," a "divine democratic government" that would have limited popular sovereignty under the authority of Allah (i.e., an Islamic theocracy).
Other associates include Ramadan, grandson of MB founder Hassan al-Banna; Sheikh Yusaf Al Qaradawi, killer, proponent of suicide bombers, and spiritual leader of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood; Bill Ayers, a communist revolutionary of the Weather Underground, involved in bombings of US governmental buildings in 1970s; and "Ground Zero" imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, founder of the Cordoba Initiative (clearly referencing the glorious days of Islam's conquest over Catholic Spain), who refused to condemn violent jihad groups as terrorists or to admit Muslims carried out the 9/11 bombing; and too many other notables.
With the foregoing to help put two and two together, now the revisions, omissions, misstatements and propaganda are no longer so surprising. Shocking, yes, but not surprising.
The following link will take you to my review of the fourth Common Core book, World History, the Modern Era. Now all we have to do is begin our own Spanish "re-conquista" (re-conquest), and retrieve our states' rights based on The Tenth Amendments -- for starters.
View PDF: History, Their Story
Tabitha Korol began her political writing letters to the editor after her retirement, and earned an award from CAMERA (Committee on Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America) “in recognition of outstanding letter-writing in 2009 to promote fair and factual reporting about Israel.” She was cited as one of America’s modern-day, articulate, patriotic women in Frederick William Dame’s Three American Fur Hat Fighters for Freedom.
She revised David Silberman’s book of Holocaust survivors’ accounts for publication, and proofreads/edits for a monthly city newsletter.
