Common Core Standards--Action Steps
Wednesday, May 25, 2011 at 11:49PM ACTION STEPS: Please ask your Congressional House members to defund Common Core Standards and Race to the Top -- $900 Million in FY 2012. The House has the authority to do this because they are the branch of government that appropriates funds.
Obama plans for these $900 Million CCS/RTTT federal dollars to go directly to local school districts. Because superintendents are so desperate to obtain funding, they most assuredly would grab their share of the $900 Million without counting the real cost -- (1) the loss of any local control whatsoever over the day-to-day curriculum and (2) the sure-and-certain indoctrination of every public school child into the Obama administration’s social justice agenda.
“Do Not ‘Read Their Lips’ -- National Curriculum Is Upon Us”
by Donna Garner
5.26.11
As you read yesterday’s Education Week article posted further on down the page, please bear this in mind: Whatever the Obama administration says with their lips is the exact opposite from what they are actually doing.
Therefore, when Sect. of Education Arne Duncan said at yesterday’s NCEE meeting, "We have not and will not prescribe a national curriculum…it would be against the law to prescribe national curriculum,” we know that that is exactly what the Obama administration is doing. In fact they are. Common Core Standards and Race to the Top are nothing but a national curriculum which is absolutely against the law.
For more information, please go to my 5.16.11 article entitled “Rising Chorus of Voices Against Federal Takeover of U. S. Public Schools” --
http://www.educationnews.org/commentaries/insights_on_education/156088.html
Donna Garner
Wgarner1@hot.rr.com
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5.4.11 -- EducationWeek
“Arne Duncan: We Will Not Prescribe a National Curriculum
By Catherine Gewertz
We've been telling you a good deal lately about the arguments over the role of the federal government in promoting common standards and in funding the development of curriculum and assessments for those standards. (If you've been napping, see here for a refresher.)
Until now, we've had only occasional words on this from federal officials (see U.S. Ed Department spokesman Peter Cunningham's comments last week). Most of the volleying on the federalism issue has come from advocates and policy wonks. Today, however, we've got weigh-ins from Rep. John Kline, the chairman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, and from Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
Kline's comments came during an appearance today on Bill Bennett's radio show, as my colleague Alyson Klein reports over at Politics K-12. During the 13-minute interview, the Minnesota Republican said he thought the federal government was using its Race to the Top program to "push" a "national curriculum." (RTT, you remember, gave states points for adopting the common standards and is also providing funding for state consortia to develop tests and curriculum materials for those standards.)
"My concern is if you look at what the administration is doing with Race to the Top and so forth, on the one hand they will say they want this bottom up, and yet it's all stick and carrot with Race to the Top," Kline said.
"You do what the secretary thinks is a good thing to do and you get rewarded, and if you don't, you get punished. ... That's the line we're talking about, where you get the federal government starting to push a national curriculum, or insisting on one, and as you know, that's been against the law, and I think correctly so. We don't want the secretary of education to decide what the curriculum is in every school in America..."
Duncan weighed in on the topic this morning as well. At a forum hosted by the National Center on Education and the Economy, Duncan was discussing lessons that can be learned from higher-performing countries, and he mentioned national standards and curriculum. But he said: "We have not and will not prescribe a national curriculum. I want to repeat that." This remark prompted laughter from the audience, my colleague Stephen Sawchuk, who attended the forum, reports. Duncan also said it would be against the law to prescribe national curriculum. (A webcast of the symposium is here.)
How, might you ask, could this debate affect the holding-together of the common-core movement? Good question. Worth watching.