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| "Whoo Hoo!" The word that started a revolution in opting out of Common Core State (sic) Standards testing. |
Susan Ohanian writing in the Daily Censored
Whoo-Hoo! Occupy the Schools! about Common Core State (sic) Standards, details how the standards are not state led, a vehicle to establish a Global Work Force, funded primarily by Bill Gates, bipartisan in nature and a quest for a national curriculum/national test:
In response to a poverty rate that tops 90% in many urban and rural
schools –and 1.6 million homeless children—many in schools with no
libraries–education reformers at the White House, the Bill and Melinda
Gates Foundation, and the National Governors Association call for a
radical, untried curriculum overhaul and two versions of nonstop
national testing to measure whether teachers are producing workers for
the Global Economy.
They call this upheaval the Common Core State
(sic) Standards (CCSS) and there are two things to remember: The Common
Core did not originate with the states and it is speculative and
experimental–in a word, cuckoo. I use the (sic) in its title because
putting the word “state” in there is a political move, a public
relations ploy. Learning from President Bill Clinton’s failure to get
the national test he wanted, corporate leaders and their political
allies try to keep this school remake as distant from the White House as
possible, insisting over and over that it’s a “grassroots initiative”
–what the people asked for. Every time they say this, the press repeats
it. The Common Core reality is about as far from Mom and apple pie as a
zombie invasion.
The Gates connection and funding is stunning and who can deny the fact that this money is driving the current educational reform?
The Common Core State (sic) Standards are the result of hundreds of
millions of dollars disbursed in carefully distributed grants from the
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation accompanied by the threat from U. S.
Secretary Arne Duncan to withhold federal funds if individual states did
not sign on the dotted line. I looked at two months worth of press
citations praising the CCSS –August and September, 2012–and then looked
up the Gates money given to those who come to praise CCSS. The list
ranges from the American Federation of Teachers ($1,000,000) to the
Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction ($823,637), from the
neo-liberal Center for American Progress ($2,998,809) to the
neo-conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute ($5,711,462). The PTA got
money ($2,005,000); so did the National Writing Project ($2,645,593).
And so on and so on. He who pays the piper calls the tune, and with
money in their pockets, many are eager to sing the Common Core song and
eat the funeral meats.
Although these groups all play a
cheerleading role, here are the significant players in deforming school
curriculum and testing and their Gates haul.
• Achieve, Inc.: $25,787,051
• The Council of Chief State School Officers: $71,302,833
• National Governors Association Center for Best Practices: $30,679,116
Chief
architects of the literacy content for the Common Core content are a
lawyer and David Coleman, an education entrepreneur. Coleman gained the
most notoriety as he barnstormed the country preaching the importance of
nonfiction and a bastardized form of New Criticism, a literary theory
abandoned long ago by just about everybody except Mr. Coleman. In his presentation
at the New York State Education Building in April 2011, Coleman
declared that teachers must tell students: “When you grow up in this
world you realize people don’t give a shit about what you feel or what
you think.” Student Achievement Partners,
an outfit Coleman co-founded is now churning out Common Core
curriculum. They’re bankrolled by $6,533,350 from the Bill and Melinda
Gates Foundation and $18,000,000 from the General Electric Foundation.
Coleman has moved on to head the College Board ($31,178,497 in Gates
funds).
My state education department in Vermont urged every teacher to watch a video
produced by the Council of Great City Schools ($8,496,854 from Gates)
in which Coleman offers advice to the student who reads several grade
levels below the complex text assigned to his class: “You’re going to
practice it again and again and again and again. . . so there’s a chance
you can finally do that level of work.”
Gates is taking advantage of the bipartisan push for this reform and the Federal Government's involvement in these Common Core State (sic) Standards:
Lots of school watchers believe the sole purpose of the Common Core
State (sic) Standards is to drive the national test which has been on
the corporate agenda for more than two decades. Although the Bill and
Melinda Gates Foundation paid for the CCSS, the new, super-duper
assessments traveling with those standards are funded by you and me. The
U. S. Department of Education gave $335 million to the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC)and the SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium
to develop computer-based tests for grades 3-12. They both plan a lot
of testing, and costs of hardware and software requirements, of rewiring
school buildings and buying computers that meet the specifications are
on the backs of local taxpayers. The Florida state department of
education recently announced an infusion of nearly half a billion
dollars to develop the necessary technology infrastructure capable of
delivering the tests. New York City estimates the same amount.
Although
hubris seems to drive Bill Gates’ education reform ideology, it is no
surprise that his foundation would find the Common Core’s huge reliance
on technology attractive. Technology and the desire to put schools under
the oversight and domination of a national test also motivated
education reformers in September 1989, when President George H.W. Bush
convened a meeting in Charlottesville, Va., for the first-ever National
Education Summit. Teachers were also absent from that meeting, Instead,
IBM CEO Lou Gerstner joined hands with Arkansas governor Bill Clinton to
lead the effort. Gerstner and his Business Roundtable cronies got to
name the problem and define the solution, which was a relabeled Business
Roundtable plan calling for school choice, competition, and a massive
infusion of technology. It was signed into federal law as America 2000.
When it morphed into Goals 2000, President Clinton was foiled in his
attempt to add a national test. Then came No Child Left Behind under
President Bush the Younger and Race to the Top and the Common Core under
President Obama. With each residency change at the White House, the
name of ed reform has changed and the content has become more
destructive to the needs of public schools and the children in them.
Ohanian provides information on how Common Core State (sic) Standards impact children. When these theories and untested standards/assessments are used on real human beings, the results are injurious to children.
Read the entire article
here and discover why "whoohoo" may be the battlecry against the educational reformers and the spark which started a parental revolt against Common Core State (sic) Standards.
