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The Common Core

State Standards Initiative

"People who characterize Common Core as anything other than a national takeover of schooling are either unaware of these sweeping implications or are deliberately hiding this information from the public."

Joy Pullmann, The Heartland Institute

July 2014

Researched and written by

Karen Hadley

Email: frisco8008@

Executive Summary

This research project on Common Core was intended to discover the real situation behind this sudden nationwide educational initiative that seemed to be implemented before anyone knew anything about it. Hundreds of websites and articles have been reviewed to assemble the best and quickest understanding possible. The pertinent passages from these sites and articles have been included here with their sources so that the reader can learn directly from the teachers and other educators who have worked with the materials.

This report will cover the nature of the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI) in several sections and provide insight into its effects on the children and parents who are struggling to adapt to this new system of teaching. Many samples of the curriculum developing from these standards will be included in relevant locations with more at the end of the report so the reader can see the way this new approach is constructed.

As is it vital to understand where this initiative suddenly came from and why, its background will be examined. The individuals intimately involved in its origination, financing, development and implementation will be identified and placed in context.

It may not be possible to sum up the entirety of CCSSI any better than Joy Pullmann of the Heartland Institute: "People who characterize Common Core as anything other than a national takeover of schooling are either unaware of these sweeping implications or are deliberately hiding this information from the public."

Usurping States' Rights over their Educational Systems

The CCSSI is said to be a state-led activity, inasmuch as the federal government does not have the right to usurp the power of the states' Departments of Education. But the initiation of this nationwide reorganization of education was embedded in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, with the plans being laid even earlier than that. As the bottom fell out of the real estate market and the economy tanked, states were offered a total of $48.6 billion to stimulate their economies. In fact, this money was essentially a bribe to commit to new standards of education – sight unseen. Forty-six states accepted the bribe.

Once the trap was thus laid, dozens of corporations busily set to writing the new educational standards that would be imposed as a result of this commitment. Funding was no problem, as Bill Gates and his foundation had signed on the prior year and was sending hundreds of millions of dollars into the corporations, non-profits and lobbying groups to complete the task or make the project appear acceptable to those who would eventually implement it. Gates was far from alone in his involvement, as George Soros also had his financial tentacles involved in the project, as well as one of the world's largest textbook publisher – Pearson, a British company headed by bankers that also publishes the Financial Times.

Through the actions of private corporations and the financial backing of Gates and others like him, the Common Core standards of American education were developed in ivory towers and were rapidly implemented, untried and untested, in Americans schools. There are many reports that the implementation methods were both secretive and unconcerned about whether or not any actual education ever took place.

Covert Control of Education and Young Minds

There are two main sections to the standards that have been thus far received: English Language Arts (ELA) and mathematics. The ELA and math standards have required the development of new lessons, new textbooks and new teacher training, all at enormous cost to the states.

While science and history standards and curricula have not yet been released, these subjects – complete with intense ideological bias – are infused into ELA and math lessons.

Language and math lessons propagandize the environmental or civics lessons that vested interests would like young minds to absorb. Parental rights are neatly pre-empted on multiple avenues of attack, such as eliciting descriptions of family roles and rules from kindergartners, and teaching fifth graders that they should "Define sexual orientation as the romantic attraction of an individual to someone of the same gender or of a different gender."

Mathematics lessons take on an entirely new structure, leaving parents fully out of the equation. A mother trying to help her children with homework will be as baffled as a sensible child trying to learn this new, unnecessarily complicated method of doing simple addition. Many children are struggling with failure and very high levels of stress as they go through the lessons and the examinations.

But these standards and the educational system they drive are nearly inescapable. The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), the standard test for admission to higher education, is being modified to align with this system. And many private and parochial schools are adopting CCSSI. The next step is to bring higher education into line with this system, a recommendation that is already making the rounds.

An additional issue with CCSSI is the collection of private information – from grades to behavior issues to health problems – in a massive national database. While the overt promise is that this data will be kept anonymous, certain erosions of the law protecting family and student privacy mean that the dozens or hundreds of corporations involved in CCSSI who may be able to benefit from this information will have access to it. There is also the potential for the most sensitive and private information about student reactions and emotional responses to be detected and stored, which opens the door to a true Big Brother environment in our schools. It is only a short step to the Guidance Counselor or psychiatrist on staff who can diagnose the child with ADHD (using the test developed by a company that was recently acquired by Pearson, the textbook publisher) and prescriptions may be written and dispensed on the spot, without parents ever knowing.

Conclusions

Common Core is an enormous subject that could keep investigative reporters busy for months. There are other aspects of this initiative that could be covered but the information contained herein will paint the picture well enough to fully understand the motivations of those in charge.

Common Core should strike deep terror into the hearts of every parent, grandparent and American. But if you ask most people what they know about it, they know very little other than the name. While there are many issues to be dealt with in this country, there are two characteristics to this initiative that make it among the most serious and fearsome: 1. its utter pervasiveness and 2. its ability to mold the minds of our children and destroy their will to learn and succeed.

The true nature and effects of this educational takeover must be exposed along with the names of every person involved in its initiation, development and implementation. These attempted crimes and unconstitutional grab of power must be revealed. As there may be nothing more dear to Americans than their children, this powerful connection can be used to excite interest and action to overcome Common Core.

Table of Contents

The Common Core State Standards Initiative 6

The Common Core Standards 10

Math & English Language Arts Lesson Samples 19

Common Core State Standards Initiative and the

Psychological-Psychiatric-Pharmaceutical Angle 23

The Players in the Common Core – Pro and Con 28

Special Report: The Connection Between

Common Core and George Soros 48

Additional Information on the

Pharmaceutical Connection to Common Core 54

Effects of Common Core 57

Data Collection and Privacy Problems 66

Does Common Core Affect Private Schools? 75

Sex Education and Common Core 81

Video Transcript from Walking the Labyrinth of the

Corporate Owned Common Core by Morna McDermott 90

From the National Center for Education Statistics 98

Additional Samples of Lessons and Tests from Common Core 101

The Common Core State Standards Initiative

Introducing Common Core

Common Core is a tangled, complex, deceptive attempt to set national standards for education, grade by grade. The claim is made repeatedly that this is not a federally mandated curriculum, as that is illegal according to multiple laws. Instead, it is being presented as a set of standards that the states collaborated on, that are intended to advance the level of education in America. As with many political issues, it is necessary to look far, far beyond the words to see what the actual actions and intentions are.

A Description of Common Core

According to the website , "The Common Core is a set of high-quality academic standards in mathematics and English language arts/literacy (ELA). These learning goals outline what a student should know and be able to do at the end of each grade. The standards were created to ensure that all students graduate from high school with the skills and knowledge necessary to succeed in college, career, and life, regardless of where they live. Forty-three states, the District of Columbia, four territories, and the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA) have voluntarily adopted and are moving forward with the Common Core." (Forty-six states original signed on but some have subsequently rejected any involvement.)

How was Common Core developed?

You will need to know the following acronyms:

CCSSO: Council of Chief State School Officers. On the CCSSO website, the following CCSSO people are identified as the lead authors of the standards: David Coleman, Sue Pimentel, Bill McCallum and Jason Zimba.

NGA: National Governor's Association. The National Governor's Association states that it is simply that, an association of the nation's governors. The top executives of this association are Governor Mary Fallin, Oklahoma - Chair; Governor John Hickenlooper, Colorado - Vice Chair; Dan Crippen is the ED.

Common Core is often referred to as CCSSI, short for Common Core State Standards Initiative or CCSS. Again, according to : "In 2009 the state school chiefs and governors that comprise CCSSO and the NGA Center coordinated a state-led effort to develop the Common Core State Standards. Designed through collaboration among teachers, school chiefs, administrators, and other experts, the standards provide a clear and consistent framework for educators."

But the Heartland Institute, a vocal critic of Common Core, says, "NGA is a private trade organization whose actions have no legal binding on states."

These organizations that guided and wrote these standards are non-governmental and as such, are not subject to the Freedom of Information Act.

Please note: One of the later sections of this report will list the prominent players in this project, both pro and con, and include brief information on their roles.

Was Common Core truly a state-led effort?

According to Mercedes Schneider, a Louisiana educator and blogger:

If one reviews this 2009 NGA news release on those principally involved in CCSS development, one views a listing of 29 individuals associated with Student Achievement Partners, ACT, College Board, and Achieve. In truth, only 2 out of 29 members are not affiliated with an education company.

(Student Achievement Partners was founded by two CCSS authors and played a leading role in setting these standards. ACT is short for American College Testing and refers to a college readiness assessment similar to the SATs. The College Board oversees the SAT tests. Achieve, Inc. is the consulting firm that has directed the Common Core project for the NGA.)

Schneider continues:

CCSS as "state-led" is fiction. Though NGA reports 29 individuals as involved with CCSS creation, it looks to be even fewer.

NGA first directly involved governors in nationalizing education standards in June 2008, when it co-hosted an education forum with the Hunt Institute, a project of former North Carolina Gov. James Hunt Jr. In December 2008, NGA, the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), and Achieve, Inc. released a report calling for national standards. The report recommended "a strong state-federal partnership" to accomplish this goal.

Also involved in creation of CCSS is Student Achievement Partners, the company David Coleman started in 2007 in order produce national standards. Student Achievement Partners has no work other than CCSS.



If the states did not contribute to Common Core State Standards, how and why did they adopt these standards for their own states?

The answer is a tale that goes back several years, before Common Core standards were even released.

In 2009, when the states were struggling financially due to the financial crisis, the federal government offered the states stimulus money as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). $53.6 billion dollars was designated for ARRA, and of this money, $48.6 billion was used to bait the states. They were offered this money if they committed to making specific changes in their educational programs.

This tactic locked any states who accepted the money into agreeing to meet standards they had not even read yet, that had not even been drafted yet. The states were just given a few months to make their applications for this money. Thus the planners of Common Core were able to get the coerced agreement of the states in a minimal period of time. Normally, this type of process would take years of review, debate and votes before educational standards would be accepted. Nearly all the states jumped for the money. Only Texas, Virginia, Nebraska and Alaska rejected the offer at this time.

This is the type of language what was used when eliciting the agreement of the states:

Stated Purpose: Improve student achievement through school improvement and reform. ARRA funds should be used to improve student achievement, and help close the achievement gap. In addition, the SFSF requires progress on four reforms previously authorized under the bipartisan Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the America Competes Act of 2007:

Making progress toward rigorous college- and career-ready standards and high-quality

assessments that are valid and reliable for all students, including English language learners and students with disabilities;

Establishing pre-K-to college and career data systems that track progress and foster continuous improvement;

Making improvements in teacher effectiveness and in the equitable distribution of qualified teachers for all students, particularly students who are most in need;

Providing intensive support and effective interventions for the lowest-performing schools.



These enhancements sound like something that any state educational system could endorse. But by agreeing to the new national standards, the states gave up their sovereignty. And they locked themselves into whatever educational controls were going to be imposed on them when the standards were released.

Common Core was only the latest effort regulate national education. There have been earlier efforts, including No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, both federal programs.

The Common Core Standards

Currently, the CCSSI includes standards for English Language Arts (ELA) and mathematics. Grade by grade, the Common Core standards lay out what skills and experience each child should have by the end of each grade. While this may seem innocent enough, it drives schools to replace real teaching with a process of coaching children to be able to pass tests that show that they achieved these standards.

These tests and the standards themselves have driven the creation of an entirely new teaching curriculum that permeates every year of public school. New textbooks have been created and more will be created that provide the specific knowledge required to pass the tests. As will be covered in this report, students are not being educated in an understanding of our culture and literature or in useful, practical mathematical skills.

States that accepted the original ARRA money have no power of choice over any part of these standards. According to Joy Pullmann, an education research fellow for The Heartland Institute and managing editor of School Reform News: "States may not change Common Core standards, must adopt all of them at once, and may only add up to an additional 15 percent of requirements. The standards themselves have no clear governance, meaning there is no procedure for states to follow to make changes they feel are necessary."



Ms. Pullman described one of the basic shifts in the Common Core standards as it compares with traditional educational methods:

A focus on "skills" and "affective" learning (e.g., emotions and values) at the expense of knowledge doomed the last attempt at national standards, Goals 2000, and the related outcomes-based education movement. Then, as now, tests were to shift away from measuring students’ ability to correctly answer grade-level knowledge questions to measuring students’ feelings, performance, and beliefs.

English Language Arts (ELA):

The website describes the ELA standards like this:

The Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts & Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects (“the standards”) represent the next generation of K–12 standards designed to prepare all students for success in college, career, and life by the time they graduate from high school.

The standards establish guidelines for English language arts (ELA) as well as for literacy in history/social studies, science, and technical subjects. Because students must learn to read, write, speak, listen, and use language effectively in a variety of content areas, the standards promote the literacy skills and concepts required for college and career readiness in multiple disciplines.

The skills and knowledge captured in the ELA/literacy standards are designed to prepare students for life outside the classroom. They include critical-thinking skills and the ability to closely and attentively read texts in a way that will help them understand and enjoy complex works of literature. Students will learn to use cogent reasoning and evidence collection skills that are essential for success in college, career, and life. The standards also lay out a vision of what it means to be a literate person who is prepared for success in the 21st century.

In this description, you can see how History, Social Studies, Science and Technical Studies can all be inserted into the English Language Arts standards.

Part of the Common Core ELA standards for the third grade read as follows:

Key Ideas and Details:

Ask and answer questions to demonstrate understanding of a text, referring explicitly to the text as the basis for the answers.

Recount stories, including fables, folktales, and myths from diverse cultures; determine the central message, lesson, or moral and explain how it is conveyed through key details in the text.

Describe characters in a story (e.g., their traits, motivations, or feelings) and explain how their actions contribute to the sequence of events

1 Craft and Structure:

Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, distinguishing literal from nonliteral language.

Refer to parts of stories, dramas, and poems when writing or speaking about a text, using terms such as chapter, scene, and stanza; describe how each successive part builds on earlier sections.

Distinguish their own point of view from that of the narrator or those of the characters.

2 Integration of Knowledge and Ideas:

Explain how specific aspects of a text's illustrations contribute to what is conveyed by the words in a story (e.g., create mood, emphasize aspects of a character or setting)

Compare and contrast the themes, settings, and plots of stories written by the same author about the same or similar characters (e.g., in books from a series)

Expensive training programs are required to teach teachers how to teach these subjects and achieve these standards. This is because the standards themselves are so complicated and because the teaching methods are completely at odds with prior practices. But teachers are deeply motivated to adhere exactly to these standards. Students will be extensively tested every year and when a class fails to achieve the standard, the teacher is subject to penalties including firing. Thus the standards and accompanying curriculum are driven in on the individual teachers.

Literature vs. "Informational" Reading

One of the disagreements that critics have with Common Core is that the standards emphasize "informational" reading and reduce the emphasis on English literature. By informational reading is meant factual articles. So there are actually two points of disagreement right here.

1. Students have less exposure to great English language literature

2. The material used for informational reading material can and does contain an ideological bias.

Outspoken Common Core critic Brad McQueen is a teacher in Arizona. He stated his disagreement this way:

The Common Core says it is only concerned with the learning standards that deal with reading, writing, and math. They say that they have no ambition to also write standards and control what kids learn in the politically charged areas of social studies and science. But these are the exact areas that they really want to control.

Common Core requires an increasing focus on informational reading and writing, so that it comprises 50% of all reading and writing in the elementary grades and increases up to 70% by the twelfth grade.

This means that by the twelfth grade, the reading lists may contain only 30% English literature. The remaining 70% will be factual articles that could contain scientific, social, ideological or political concepts.

Common Core critic, mom and blogger Christel Lane Swasey elaborated on this shift from literature to informational reading:

"Informational text is anything that used to belong mostly in other subjects. It is now taking 70% of high school seniors’ English class readings, in the form of scientific writings, political writings; opinion pieces; almost anything other than classic novels, poetry, plays or other fictional works."

Jane Robbins is a senior fellow at the American Principles Project in Washington, D.C. Her critique of Common Core includes these comments:

The slant of the ELA standards away from knowledge and toward 'critical thinking' is also evident from the recommendations of informational texts to be studied. These recommendations are heavily weighted toward short documents or excerpts from longer documents. Should students read entire books? This is generally unnecessary, apparently, to get the flavor of the work and to have something to think critically about. Will Fitzhugh of The Concord Review notes this truncating feature of Common Core:

Let us consider saving students more time from their fictional non-informational text readings (previously known as literature) by cutting back on the complete novels, plays and poems formerly offered in our high schools. For instance, instead of Pride and Prejudice (the whole novel), students could be asked to read Chapter Three. Instead of the complete Romeo and Juliet, they could read Act Two, Scene Two, and in poetry, instead of a whole sonnet, perhaps just alternate stanzas could be assigned. In this way, they could get the 'gist' of great works of literature, enough to be, as it were, 'grist' for their deeper analytic cognitive thinking skill mills.

A member of the “Implementing Common Core Standards” team at the Center for Teaching Quality argues that excerpts can be as educational as complete works:

Not every student needs to read every word of every work. We can pull essential excerpts and examine them in small chunks—words, phrases, sentences—asking students to wrestle meaning from the text

From the standards themselves: "The Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts address reading in history/social studies as well as science and technical subjects, and in so doing may increase the relevance of high school instruction."

Christel adds:

In calling classic literature and personal writing irrelevant, these Common Core proponents underscore the idea that job prep matters, but not the pursuit of wisdom or knowledge.



On this subject, Brad McQueen stated:

Therefore, the Common Core group demands that, starting in sixth grade, students’ writing be infused with social studies and science content. This is a backdoor way of controlling what the kids will learn in these two fields. I can imagine a centrally controlled Common Core machine "infusing" kids’ readings with political content that is in line with the President’s position on green energy, immigration, or healthcare.

On a different note, Mr. McQueen continues:

A problem that seems to be played out again and again in the Common Core materials is added complexity. A scoring system used to determine the correct reading materials for each grade exemplifies this complexity.

The Cato Institute, a think tank dedicated to the principles of individual liberty, limited government, free markets and peace, further describes this complexity:

Common Core uses "lexiles," which measure things like sentence length and vocabulary to rate the complexity of a text, to determine which books are suitable for each grade level. As Professor Blaine Greteman points out at The New Republic, the simplistic lexile scores absurdly conclude that'The Hunger Games is more complex than'Grapes of Wrath and that Sports Illustrated for Kids is more complex than'To Kill a Mockingbird. Greteman concludes, "Lexile scoring is the intellectual equivalent of a thermometer: perfect for cooking turkeys, but not for encouraging moral growth."



As discussed, the standards require that new curriculums are created to teach students what they need to know to pass the tests. Parents and teachers have had serious disagreements with the content of many of these lessons. The reason for these upsets are obvious when you see the lessons. Samples of these lessons are included after this report with most samples at the end of this report.

Mathematics

When it comes to the standards for math, the complexity factor becomes intense. In fact, it becomes downright mind-boggling. Parents state that they are unable to help their children with their homework because they can't understand the lessons.

This is how the Math standard describes the standard of education for a ten-year-old child:

Recognize volume as additive. Find volumes of solid figures composed of two non-overlapping right rectangular prisms by adding the volumes of the non-overlapping parts, applying this technique to solve real world problem.

On the National Review website, a father describes the problem he has with his first-grade son's math lessons:

My first-grade son’s Common Core math lesson in basic subtraction. Six- and seven-year-olds do not yet possess the ability to think abstractly; their mathematics instruction, therefore, must employ concrete methodologies, explanations, and examples. But rather than, say, count on a number line or use objects, Common Core’s standards mandate teaching first-graders to 'decompose' two-digit numbers in an effort to emphasize the concept of place value. Thus 13 – 4 is warped into 13 – 3 = 10 – 1 = 9. Decomposition is a useful skill for older children, but my first-grade son has no clue what it is about or how to do it. He can, however, memorize the answer to 13 – 4. But Common Core does not advocate that tried-and-true technique.

Common Core’s elevation of concept over computation continues in its place-value method for multiplying two-digit numbers, which is taught in fourth grade. Rather than multiply each digit of the number from right to left, Common Core requires students to multiply each place value so that they have to add four numbers, rather than two, as the final step in finding the product.

Common Core’s most distinctive feature is its insistence that “mathematically proficient students” express understanding of the underlying concepts behind math problems through verbal and written expression. No longer is it sufficient to solve a word problem or algebraic equation and “show your work”; now the work is to be explained by way of written sentences.

Common Core: "Rigorous"

As mentioned, one of the most often-repeated descriptions of Common Core is that it is "rigorous." You pretty much can't read anything about Common Core without finding this word used. CCSSI critic Brad McQueen:

The Common Core group confuses "more rigorous" with "more complicated." In math they boast about how their standards teach less math concepts at each grade level than before, but they teach them deeper. A kid can’t just know that 12-9=3, they have to demonstrate their knowledge of this concept by showing it five different ways visually. Many of these ridiculous math problems are posted daily online for the world to see by bewildered parents of equally bewildered children.

The following statement offers a further illustration of the problem right at the core of this educational method.

In a pretty amazing YouTube video, Amanda August, a curriculum coordinator in a suburb of Chicago called Grayslake, explains that getting the right answer in math just doesn’t matter as long as kids can explain the necessarily faulty reasoning they used to get to that wrong answer.

"Even if they said, '3 x 4 was 11,' if they were able to explain their reasoning and explain how they came up with their answer really in, umm, words and oral explanation, and they showed it in the picture but they just got the final number wrong, we’re really more focused on the how," August says in the video.

When someone in the audience (presumably a parent, but it’s not certain) asks if teachers will be, you know, correcting students who don’t know rudimentary arithmetic instantly, August makes another meandering, longwinded statement.

"We want our students to compute correctly but the emphasis is really moving more towards the explanation, and the how, and the why, and ‘can I really talk through the procedures that I went through to get this answer,’” August details. “And not just knowing that it’s 12, but why is it 12? How do I know that?”



Deficiencies in Math Standards

Aside from problems with complexity, there are other criticisms directed at the mathematics standards. Some critics say that some basic mathematics skills are either taught too late or are not taught at all.

For example, some critics say that algebra is introduced too late in a child's education.

Former U.S. Department of Education official and mathematician Ze’ev Wurman has said Core math standards would graduate students "below the admission requirement of most four-year state colleges." He has particularly criticized that the Core pushes algebra back to grade 9, "contrary to the practice of the highest- achieving nations," which begin algebra in grade 8.

Common Core also fails to include preliminary calculus at any level of high school education. Not all students will need calculus but those intending to attend a selective college will need it. (A community college is non-selective; a full, four-year university is selective.)

Parent blogger and Common Core critic Christel Swasey described the reason that this omission is a big problem. In her description, she refers to a STEM career: Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.

Does Common Core prepare students for college? Not for a 4-year university. It minimally prepares students for the non-collegiate workforce or for non-selective community colleges. A key Common Core creator, Jason Zimba, said that the Common Core can prepare students for non-selective colleges but that it does not prepare students for STEM careers. He said: "I think it’s a fair critique that it’s a minimal definition of college readiness… but not for the colleges most parents aspire to… Not only not for STEM, it’s also not for selective colleges. For example, for U.C. Berkeley, whether you are going to be an engineer or not, you’d better have precalculus to get into U.C. Berkeley."



So to attend a selective college, a student would need to supplement their high school education with precalculus.

Science and History

So far, only ELA and math standards have been received. While some sources state that there will not be science and history standards, these other standards are rapidly approaching.

The website stated:

As school districts across the country are working diligently to unpack and implement the Common Core Standards for Mathematics and English Language Arts, another initiative has been steadily progressing. The initial public draft of the Next Generation Science Education Standards will be released in a few months.

It appears that ideological concepts are infiltrated into both ELA and science lessons. The website states:

The Next Generation Science Standards were developed by the National Research Council, the National Science Teachers Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the nonprofit Achieve and more than two dozen states. They recommend that educators teach the evidence for man-made climate change starting as early as elementary school and incorporate it into all science classes, ranging from earth science to chemistry. By eighth grade, students should understand that "human activities, such as the release of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels, are major factors in the current rise in Earth’s mean surface temperature (global warming)," the standards say.



Math & ELA Lesson Samples

The mother stated that this homework came home with no other instructions.

A note on this ELA lesson: This lesson belongs to Pearson Education, the manufacturer of textbooks. I found one comment that, after this lesson began making the rounds, Pearson apologized for it. I am guessing that the lesson may have been withdrawn.

Common Core State Standards Initiative and the

Psychological-Psychiatric-Pharmaceutical Angle

As I looked for a strong connection between CCSSI and mental health or drugging, the most frequent concern being expressed about Common Core is that children who are currently diagnosed Learning Disabled or as suffering from ADHD will be left behind in this new system of teaching. It's being discussed by both advocates and opponents. A few people realize that the stress that is already being seen could drive more children into diagnoses like these but those comments are few and far between.

Finding a connection between CCSSI and the potential for increased mental treatment literally took hours. The connecting point is Pearson.

Pearson is the major publisher of books and lessons that align with Common Core. About itself, Pearson says: Pearson is the world's leading education company. From pre-school to high school, early learning to professional certification, our curriculum materials, multimedia learning tools and testing programmes help to educate millions of people worldwide - more than any other private enterprise.

In August 2013, Pearson acquired an ADHD testing company. Here's the press release on this acquisition. As you read it, you might ask yourself why a publisher would want to acquire an ADHD testing company.

Pearson Acquires ADHD Testing Company BioBehavioral Diagnostics

Bloomington, MN (PRWEB) August 27, 2013

Pearson today announced the acquisition of substantially all of the assets of the BioBehavioral Diagnostics Company (BioBDx), the developer and marketer of the Quotient® System, the first U.S. FDA-cleared tool for the objective measurement of hyperactivity, impulsivity and inattention as an aid in the assessment of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The Quotient ADHD Test provides quantitative analysis of motion, attention and shifts in attention states, bringing a new level of rigor and reliability to ADHD diagnosis and remediation. Focusing on a highly prevalent condition known to pose serious challenges to educational outcomes, this acquisition marks a strategic entry into healthcare markets for Pearson, the world leader in clinical and educational assessment for learners.

The Quotient ADHD Test quantifies the severity of deficits in brain functions related to the symptoms of ADHD and helps clinicians to accurately diagnose and efficiently manage the condition through repeat assessments at critical decision points. The Quotient ADHD Test is currently used in pediatric, neurology and psychiatry offices throughout the United States.

“We are taking immediate steps to strengthen support for current Quotient customers and expand our outreach to healthcare professionals,” said Aurelio Prifitera, President and CEO of Pearson Clinical Assessment. “We also look forward to introducing the Quotient ADHD Test to mental health and education professionals in both clinical and school settings.” (Emphasis added.)

ADHD is the most common neurobehavioral condition in children, and symptoms persist into adulthood in approximately 60 percent of cases. It affects approximately 6.7 million children and adolescents and nearly 15 million adults in the United States. ADHD makes it difficult for a person to control behavior and may have serious consequences, including failure in school, family stress and disruption, depression, problems with relationships, substance abuse, delinquency, risk for accidental injuries and job failure. Early identification and effective treatment are extremely important. As such, ADHD is a condition that is central to Pearson's vision to meet the educational needs across a spectrum of individuals.

Byron Hewett, Chairman and CEO of BioBDx, said, “As a part of Pearson, Quotient product development, clinical trials and commercial activities will be funded more robustly and the product will be offered to an even broader audience. This will accelerate awareness and adoption, improve efficiency of patient visits and, ultimately, raise the standard of care for ADHD. Our team has deep expertise in the diagnostic world, and we believe Pearson will benefit from that expertise in the years to come.”

More self-description of Pearson: Pearson is the world’s leading education company, providing educational materials, technologies, assessments and related services to teachers and students of all ages. Though we generate approximately 60% of our sales in North America, we operate in more than 70 countries. We publish across the curriculum under a range of respected imprints including Scott Foresman, Prentice Hall, Addison-Wesley, Allyn and Bacon, Benjamin Cummings and Longman.

We are also a leading provider of electronic learning programmes and of test development, processing and scoring services to educational institutions, corporations and professional bodies around the world.



Pearson also publishes the Financial Times.

I looked through Pearson's Board of Directors. Mostly they are British bankers. Then there is this fellow:

Joshua Lewis:

Josh's experience spans finance, education and the development of digital enterprises. He is the founder of Salmon River Capital LLC, a New York-based private equity / venture capital firm focused on technology-enabled businesses in education, financial services and other sectors. Over a 25 year career in active, principal investing, he has been involved in a broad range of successful companies, including several pioneering enterprises in the education sector. In addition, he has long been active in the non-profit education sector, with associations including New Leaders, New Classrooms, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He is also a non-executive director of eVestment and Axioma, both financial data / technology companies, and Parchment, an education credentials management company. (Emphasis added.)



I have not yet turned up further connections between Common Core, Pearson and pharmaceutical companies or mental health entities. It could be that the structure for mental health screenings will be run via the states and cities, as seen here in this information from Connecticut, posted June 20, 2014:

MENTAL AND BEHAVIORAL HEALTH SCREENINGS

1) Connecticut Public Act 13-3 established a task force to study the behavioral health services in the state. Following the murders at Newtown, this act had as its particular focus the provision of health services for people sixteen to twenty-five years of age.

The task force met throughout 2013 and issued a final report in April. Its first recommendation includes mandated screening for behavioral health problems by primary care providers for children ages 0-25 years old. Parents of children who suffer mental illness stated repeatedly in public hearings that diagnosis was not the problem they faced; rather, they suffered from lack of access to services and poor coordination of services. TEACH supports coordination of care services. We will continue to monitor legislation that would, however, be overly broad and intrusive, such as:

CT Senate Bill 471 - 2014. This bill would have required mental health screenings for school-age children. At a public hearing on March 19, only two of the 21 people submitting testimony spoke in favor of the bill overall. Thirteen opposed a section of the bill which lessened educational requirements for those in the mental health profession.

2) Connecticut Public Act 13-178 calls for DCF to provide a statewide children’s behavioral health plan. Throughout 2014 an Advisory Committee has held open public forums to hear the concerns regarding children’s mental and behavioral health. A draft plan is scheduled for completion in August 2014, with a final report to the legislature in October 2014. Video testimony available of some of the forums shows parents once again detailing the frustration of seeking access to coordinated care services. TEACH will continue to monitor the reports when they become available.



And there is this information from New York City schools.

1 School-Based Mental Health Program: Eliminating Barriers to Academic Achievement

Project HOPE Resources

The Project HOPE Counseling Program offers crisis services to schools, specifically those most affected by Hurricane Sandy. Although schools demonstrated tremendous resilience and offered safe havens to many students affected by Hurricane Sandy, emotional distress caused by this kind of crisis is complicated, can be long-ranging and may still be developing. As the one year anniversary of Hurricane Sandy approaches, Project HOPE offers services to assist schools with planning through February 2014. Project Hope resources are now available on theDOE Portal. (Look at side column and crisis resource section).

The DOE School-Based Mental Health Program offers a variety of services targeting those students who have emotional and behavioral difficulties in general education. The program oversees collaborations and initiatives with mental health agencies, hospitals, and youth serving non-profits that treat, prevent and educate students and their families dealing with mental health issues that impede academic achievement.

Models of Service:

• On-Site Mental Health Programs – offers individual treatment, groups, family counseling, and crisis interventions on school campus.

• Mobile Response Team (MRT) Program – offers assessments, consultations, classroom observations, crisis interventions, professional development for teachers, parent trainings, and referrals for treatment in the community.

• STARS (Screening the At-Risk Student) – implemented by nurses in middle schools. Offer suicide and depression screenings and referrals for further psychological assessments as needed.

• At Risk for High & Middle School Teacher Training – Free web based online training program aims to teach educators and others that work in both middle and high school buildings how to indentify, approach, and refer students who show signs of psychological distress. Accessing the course is easy! If you work in a High School Go to: .

• Early Recognition and Screening Program - Community mental health providers offer screenings school-wide for underlining emotional and behavioral issues. With parental consent, student can be referred for further assessment and offered treatment if indicated.

• Presentations – Presentations and trainings on a wide variety of emotional topics relevant to youth. Resources presentation for staff and families.

• NYC TEEN Website – this teen friendly website engages teens dealing with depression, drugs and violence, and encourages them to seek help. Go to Teen .

What is a School-Based Mental Health Program?

A School-Based Mental Health Program (SBMH) is like a mental health office inside a school. SBMH offer a wide range of full, comprehensive mental health services in the school and have been providing on-site mental health services to Department of Education students for over 20 years. There are over 200 SBMH programs serving NYC schools in all five boroughs. All services are private and kept confidential from the school staff.

The Players in the Common Core – Pro and Con

The people involved in creating, implementing and perpetuating Common Core stretch vastly across business, education and government. They have recruited many more players and trained them to provide support. There are also plenty of detractors. Many of these are educators but some are political activists. Common Core has tended to bring people together people with remarkably different political views who yet see eye to eye on this issue. There are hundreds of people – educators, legislators and parents –on both sides of this fence, but this report will cover some of the biggest, best known and most significant players and include statements from many of them that explain their positions.

In June 2014, the Washington Post published an in-depth look at how the Common Core got launched. Here some a couple of excerpts from their report.

The pair of education advocates had a big idea, a new approach to transform every public-school classroom in America. By early 2008, many of the nation’s top politicians and education leaders had lined up in support.

But that wasn’t enough. The duo needed money — tens of millions of dollars, at least — and they needed a champion who could overcome the politics that had thwarted every previous attempt to institute national standards.

So they turned to the richest man in the world.

On a summer day in 2008, Gene Wilhoit, director of a national group of state school chiefs, and David Coleman, an emerging evangelist for the standards movement, spent hours in Bill Gates’s sleek headquarters near Seattle, trying to persuade him and his wife, Melinda, to turn their idea into reality...

After the meeting, weeks passed with no word. Then Wilhoit got a call: Gates was in.

What followed was one of the swiftest and most remarkable shifts in education policy in U.S. history.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation didn’t just bankroll the development of what became known as the Common Core State Standards. With more than $200 million, the foundation also built political support across the country, persuading state governments to make systemic and costly changes.

Bill Gates was de facto organizer, providing the money and structure for states to work together on common standards in a way that avoided the usual collision between states’ rights and national interests that had undercut every previous effort, dating from the Eisenhower administration.

The Gates Foundation spread money across the political spectrum, to entities including the big teachers' unions, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, and business organizations such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — groups that have clashed in the past but became vocal backers of the standards.

Money flowed to policy groups on the right and left, funding research by scholars of varying political persuasions who promoted the idea of common standards. Liberals at the Center for American Progress and conservatives affiliated with the American Legislative Exchange Council who routinely disagree on nearly every issue accepted Gates money and found common ground on the Common Core.

Gates money went to state and local groups, as well, to help influence policymakers and civic leaders. And the idea found a major booster in President Obama, whose new administration was populated by former Gates Foundation staffers and associates. The administration designed a special contest using economic stimulus funds to reward states that accepted the standards.

The result was astounding: Within just two years of the 2008 Seattle meeting, 45 states and the District of Columbia had fully adopted the Common Core State Standards.



The Hunt Institute and Jim Hunt

Per the Washington Post article, the Gates Foundation was a lavish funder of The Hunt Institute. Jim Hunt was a four-time governor of North Carolina who then began this institute.

According to the Washington Post article:

The Gates Foundation gave more than $5 million to the University of North Carolina-affiliated Hunt Institute, led by the state’s former four-term Democratic governor, Jim Hunt, to advocate for the Common Core in statehouses around the country.

The grant was the institute’s largest source of income in 2009, more than 10 times the size of its next largest donation

With the Gates money, the Hunt Institute coordinated more than a dozen organizations — many of them also Gates grantees — including the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, National Council of La Raza, the Council of Chief State School Officers, National Governors Association, Achieve and the two national teachers unions.

The Hunt Institute held weekly conference calls between the players that were directed by Stefanie Sanford, who was in charge of policy and advocacy at the Gates Foundation. They talked about which states needed shoring up, the best person to respond to questions or criticisms and who needed to travel to which state capital to testify, according to those familiar with the conversations.

The Hunt Institute spent $437,000 to hire GMMB, a strategic communications firm owned by Jim Margolis, a top Democratic strategist and veteran of both of Obama’s presidential campaigns. GMMB conducted polling around standards, developed fact sheets, identified language that would be effective in winning support and prepared talking points, among other efforts.

The groups organized by Hunt developed a “messaging tool kit” that included sample letters to the editor, op-ed pieces that could be tailored to individuals depending on whether they were teachers, parents, business executives or civil rights leaders.

Judith Rizzo from the Hunt Institute and her associations:

Judith Rizzo is executive director of the Hunt Institute, founded by former North Carolina Gov. Jim Hunt, a major proponent of common academic standards. The Gates Foundation has heavily invested in the Hunt Institute, which in turn hired pollsters and strategists, including former Obama strategist Jim Margolis’ firm, to craft talking points and other communication to be used by proponents of the Common Core. The institute has convened regular conference calls among groups advocating for the standards, which were led early on by Stefanie Sanford of the Gates Foundation.



Funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to the Hunt Institute:

|James B. Hunt, Jr. Institute for Educational Leadership and |2013 |College-Ready |US Program |$1,749,070 |

|Policy Foundation, Inc. | | | | |

|James B. Hunt, Jr. Institute for Educational Leadership and |2013 |College-Ready |US Program |$500,000 |

|Policy Foundation, Inc. | | | | |

|James B. Hunt, Jr. Institute for Educational Leadership and |2013 |College-Ready |US Program |$250,669 |

|Policy Foundation, Inc. | | | | |

|James B. Hunt, Jr. Institute for Educational Leadership and |2013 |College-Ready |US Program |$100,000 |

|Policy Foundation, Inc. | | | | |

|James B. Hunt, Jr. Institute for Educational Leadership and |2012 |Global Policy & Advocacy |US Program |$45,422 |

|Policy Foundation, Inc. | | | | |

|James B. Hunt, Jr. Institute for Educational Leadership and |2011 |College-Ready |US Program |$500,906 |

|Policy Foundation, Inc. | | | | |

|James B. Hunt, Jr. Institute for Educational Leadership and |2010 |Postsecondary Success |US Program |$292,594 |

|Policy Foundation, Inc. | | | | |

|James B. Hunt, Jr. Institute for Educational Leadership and |2009 and earlier|College-Ready |US Program |$5,549,352 |

|Policy Foundation, Inc. | | | | |

|James B. Hunt, Jr. Institute for Educational Leadership and |2009 and earlier|Global Policy & Advocacy |US Program |$2,213,470 |

|Policy Foundation, Inc. | | | | |



David Coleman is often called the "Architect of Common Core." He is currently the president of the College Board, the organization that administers the SAT college entrance exam, a test that is being updated to conform to Common Core standards. According to the Washington Post:

David Coleman worked at McKinsey, and with his fellow Rhodes scholar, Jason Zimba, founded Grow Network, a consulting firm that analyzed test data for school districts and states. While at Grow Network, Coleman did work for Vicki Phillips while she was education commissioner of Pennsylvania. The company also worked for the Chicago Public Schools while Arne Duncan was chief executive. After selling Grow Network to McGraw Hill, Coleman and Zimba founded Student Achievement Partners, a non-profit devoted to creating higher academic standards. Along with Sue Pimentel, also of Student Achievement Partners, he was a lead writer of the Common Core standards in English language arts. In 2012, Coleman became the ninth president of the College Board, a non-profit that oversees the SAT college entrance exam. Student Achievement Partners has received $6.4 million from the Gates Foundation.



US News reports that Coleman has never taught in a classroom or supervised a school.



Jason Zimba is a founding partner of Student Achievement Partners. He is a physicist and mathematician who met David Coleman when both were at Oxford University as Rhodes scholars. Later, he founded Grow Network and Student Achievement Partners with Coleman. He was a lead writer of the Common Core standards.



National Governors Association (NGA) states that it is simply that, an association of the nation's governors. The top executives of this association are Governor Mary Fallin, Oklahoma - Chair Governor John Hickenlooper, Colorado - Vice Chair. Dan Crippen is the ED. According to Arizonans Against Common Core, this is a trade association that does not include all governors.

Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO)

From their website:

The Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) is a nationwide, nonpartisan, and nonprofit membership organization.The only one of its kind to bring together the top education leaders from every state in the nation.

Our nation's chief state school officers are committed to creating a public education system that prepares every child for lifelong learning, work, and citizenship. CCSSO's promise is to lead chiefs and their organizations in this effort by focusing on those state-driven leverage points they are uniquely positioned to address-and increasing their capacity to produce students ready to succeed as productive members of society.



Their partners include Microsoft, McGraw-Hill Education, Pearson Education, College Board, Intel Corporation, Scholastic, Texas Instruments, Cisco and many others.

About the CCSSO, a blog run by three parents interested in education and the Common Core made an interesting observation.

BYU Professor Ed Carter is an expert on copyright. He said it appeared to him that the NGA/CCSSO copyright on the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) is a smokescreen. Because governments cannot copyright things, the Dept. of Education not only couldn’t legally write national standards under GEPA* law and the Constitution but the Dept. of Education could not copyright standards, either.

So it’s getting clearer and clearer. The only way the Dept of ED could do this nationalization of education and yank local autonomy out of our hands –and appear sort of legal about it– was to promote Common Core via other groups. And they have: Achieve, NGA, CCSSO, Bill Gates– all nongovernmental groups – have written, promoted and paid for the Common Core.



*GEPA: General Education Provisions Act -

Dr. June Atkinson is President of the CCSSO – one of the two DC trade groups that put together the Common Core and holds its copyright.



"NGA Center/CCSSO shall be acknowledged as the sole owners and developers of the Common Core State Standards, and no claims to the contrary shall be made."



Achieve, Inc. is another company involved in Common Core development. From their website:

Achieve is proud to be the leading voice for the college- and career-ready agenda, and has helped transform the concept of “college and career readiness for all students” from a radical proposal into a national agenda.

Achieve is an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit education reform organization dedicated to working with states to raise academic standards and graduation requirements, improve assessments, and strengthen accountability. Created in 1996 by a bipartisan group of governors and business leaders, Achieve is leading the effort to make college and career readiness a priority across the country so that students graduating from high school are academically prepared for postsecondary success. When states want to collaborate on education policy or practice, they come to Achieve. At the direction of 48 states, and partnering with the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, Achieve helped develop the Common Core State Standards. Twenty-six states and the National Research Council asked Achieve to manage the process to write the Next Generation Science Standards. In the past Achieve also served as the project manager for states in the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers. And since 2005, Achieve has worked with state teams, governors, state education officials, postsecondary leaders and business executives to improve postsecondary preparation by aligning key policies with the demands of the real world so that all students graduate from high school with the knowledge and skills they need to fully reach their promise in college, careers and life.

Mother, blogger and columnist Michelle Malkin says this about Achieve, Inc:

Who’s behind Achieve? Reminder: The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has dumped $37 million into the group since 1999 to promote Common Core. According to a new analysis by former Georgia State University professor Jack Hassard, the Gates Foundation has now doled out an estimated total of $2.3 billion on Common Core-related grants to thousands of recipients in addition to NGA, CCSSO, the Foundation for Excellence in Education and Achieve.



According to Arizonans Against Common Core:

Eventually the creators of the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI) realized the need to present a facade of state involvement, and therefore, enlisted the National Governors Association (NGA) {a trade association that doesn't include all governors}, and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), another DC-based trade association. Neither of these groups have grant authority from any particular state or states to write the standards. The bulk of the creative work was done by Achieve, Inc., a DC-based nonprofit that includes many progressive education reformers who have been advocating national standards and curriculum for decades. Massive funding for all this came from private interests such as The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which has donated $150 million in grants to implement the Common Core Standards.



The Achieve, Inc. Board of Directors includes:

Craig R Barrett, formerly of Intel Corporation.

Mark B Grier of Prudential Financial, Inc.

Governors Bill Haslam (TN), Jay Nixon (MO) and Deval Patrick (MA)

Louis Gerstner, Jr formerly of IBM

Michael Cohen, president and his associations: "A nationally-recognized leader in education policy and standards-based reform, Michael Cohen became President of Achieve in 2003. He has held several key roles in education during the past 20+ years, including Director of Education Policy at the National Governors Association (1985-90) and Director of Planning and Policy Development at the National Association of State Boards of Education (1983-1985). During the Clinton Administration he served as Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education, Special Assistant to President Clinton for Education Policy, and Senior Advisor to U.S. Secretary of Education Richard Riley."

Arne Duncan, US Secretary of Education

In a speech to UNESCO, he said: “On K-12 education, our theory of action starts with the four assurances incorporated in last year’s economic stimulus bill, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (2009). The four assurances got their name from the requirement that each governor in the 50 states had to provide an 'assurance' they would pursue reforms in four areas-in exchange for their share of funds from a Recovery Act program designed to largely stem job loss among teachers and principals.”

Before becoming education secretary in 2009, Arne Duncan was chief executive of the Chicago Public Schools, which received $20 million from Gates to break up several large high schools and create smaller versions, a move aimed at stemming the dropout rate. A few years later, Gates backtracked on his assumption that breaking up large high schools would improve education:

In November 2008, Bill Gates publicly backtracked, acknowledging in a speech in Seattle that "simply breaking up existing schools into smaller units often did not generate the gains we were hoping for." Still, the foundation has not renounced its original mission. Gates credits smaller schools for their proficiency at boosting attendance and decreasing violence. "So we absolutely believe in the small schools thing," he says. "Calling that a failure is not fair."



From the Washington Post:

As secretary, Duncan named as his chief of staff Margot Rogers, a top Gates official he got to know through that grant. He also hired James Shelton, a program officer at the foundation, to serve first as his head of innovation and most recently as the deputy secretary, responsible for a wide array of federal policy decisions.

Duncan and his team leveraged stimulus money to reward states that adopted common standards.

They created Race to the Top, a $4.3 billion contest for education grants. Under the contest rules, states that adopted high standards stood the best chance of winning. It was a clever way around federal laws that prohibit Washington from interfering in what takes place in classrooms. It was also a tantalizing incentive for cash-strapped states.

Heading the effort for Duncan was Joanne Weiss, previously the chief operating officer of the Gates-backed NewSchools Venture Fund.



More on Duncan from education blogger Peter Greene:

In announcing a new emphasis and "major shift," the U.S. Department of Education will now demand that states show educational progress for students with disabilities.

Arne Duncan announced that, shockingly, students with disabilities do poorly in school. They perform below level in both English and math. No, there aren't any qualifiers attached to that. Arne is bothered that students with very low IQs, students with low function, students who have processing problems, students who have any number of impairments -- these students are performing below grade level.

"We know that when students with disabilities are held to high expectations and have access to a robust curriculum, they excel," Duncan said. (per NPR coverage)



On this point, nationally-known educator Dr. Louisa Moats said:

I have not yet seen a well-informed policy directive that addresses the needs of these populations. There are absurd directives about "universal design for learning" and endless accommodations, like reading a test aloud, to kids with learning disabilities. Why would we want to do that? The test itself is inappropriate for many kids.



And from the website :

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan insisted that “white suburban moms” are to blame for the unrelenting opposition to Common Core standards.

Duncan’s remarks came in a speech he gave at a meeting of the Council of Chief State Schools Officers Organization in Richmond, Va. on Friday, reports The Washington Post.

“It’s fascinating to me that some of the pushback is coming from, sort of, white suburban moms who — all of a sudden — their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were, and that’s pretty scary,” Duncan proclaimed. “You’ve bet your house and where you live and everything on, ‘My child’s going to be prepared.’ That can be a punch in the gut.”



Jeb Bush, former governor of Florida. According to Michelle Malkin:

Jeb Bush’s “Foundation for Excellence in Education” is also saturating the airwaves with ads trying to salvage Common Core in the face of truly bipartisan, truly grassroots opposition in his own home state of Florida. As I’ve reported previously, the former GOP governor’s foundation is tied at the hip to the federally funded testing consortium called PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers), which pulled in $186 million through the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program to develop Common Core tests.

One of the Bush foundation’s top corporate sponsors is Pearson, the multibillion-dollar educational publishing and testing conglomerate. Pearson snagged $23 million in contracts to design the first wave of PARCC test items and $1 billion for overpriced, insecure Common Core iPads purchased by the Los Angeles Unified School District, and is leading the $13.4 billion edutech cash-in catalyzed by Common Core’s technology mandates.



Opponents of Common Core:

There are many opponents to Common Core. They range from teachers and parents to activists and politicians.

Glenn Beck: Conservative broadcaster Glenn Beck and his followers, meanwhile, also believe Common Core is a back-door means for the government to spy on citizens and indoctrinate children in what Beck called “an extreme liberal ideology.”



Dissenters: James Milgram and Sandra Stotsky:

After the standards were developed, a Validation Committee of educators was summoned to put their stamp on the project. In the publication that followed the validation process:

The National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) commissioned this report to chronicle the work of the Common Core State StandardsValidation Committee, a key element of the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI).



Two of the educators on that committee refused to add their signatures, James Milgram and Sandra Stotsky.

Dr. James Milgram (Stanford University emeritus professor who served on the official Common Core validation committee) reported:

I can tell you that my main objection to Core Standards, and the reason I didn’t sign off on them was that they did not match up to international expectations. They were at least 2 years behind the practices in the high achieving countries by 7th grade, and, as a number of people have observed, only require partial understanding of what would be the content of a normal, solid, course in Algebra I or Geometry. Moreover, they cover very little of the content of Algebra II, and none of any higher level course… They will not help our children match up to the students in the top foreign countries when it comes to being hired to top level jobs.

Sandra Stotsky, Ed.D, is professor of education reform emerita at the University of Arkansas.

According to :

A professor emerita at the University of Arkansas, Stotsky is credited with developing one of the country’s strongest sets of academic standards for K-12 students, as well as the strongest academic standards and licensure tests for prospective teachers, while serving as Senior Associate Commissioner in the Massachusetts Department of Education from 1999-2003.

Stotsky’s experience with Common Core has left her quite busy as she travels the country giving lectures and testifying before state legislative committees about what she has come to refer to as the “propaganda” that is the Common Core standards.

“We are a very naive people,” Stotsky told Breitbart News. “Everyone was willing to believe that the Common Core standards are ‘rigorous,’ ‘competitive,’ ‘internationally benchmarked,’ and ‘research-based.’ They are not. Many people were quick to believe that the standards were ‘all those things’ at least in part because of the fact they were privately backed by corporations and, primarily, by the Gates Foundation. In many ways, whoever is ultimately behind the Common Core used private groups to their advantage. Because Common Core is run by private corporations and foundations, there can be no Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) filings or 'sunshine laws' to find out who got to choose the people who actually wrote the standards. It’s completely non-transparent and rather shady. Everyone bought into it, and now there is lots of damage to undo."

Diane Ravitch is a historian of education. She is Research Professor of Education at New York University. She has written ten books and edited another 14. She is a graduate of the Houston public schools, Wellesley College (BA), Columbia University (Ph.D. in history of American education), and holds nine honorary doctorates. In 2011, she received the Daniel Patrick Moynihan award from the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences for her careful use of data and research to advance the common good. She expressed her reasons for refusing to endorse Common Core in a blog post which is excerpted here.

From Diane Ravitch: I have thought long and hard about the Common Core standards.

I have decided that I cannot support them.

In this post, I will explain why.

I have long advocated for voluntary national standards, believing that it would be helpful to states and districts to have general guidelines about what students should know and be able to do as they progress through school.

Such standards, I believe, should be voluntary, not imposed by the federal government; before implemented widely, they should be thoroughly tested to see how they work in real classrooms; and they should be free of any mandates that tell teachers how to teach because there are many ways to be a good teacher, not just one. I envision standards not as a demand for compliance by teachers, but as an aspiration defining what states and districts are expected to do. They should serve as a promise that schools will provide all students the opportunity and resources to learn reading and mathematics, the sciences, the arts, history, literature, civics, geography, and physical education, taught by well-qualified teachers, in schools led by experienced and competent educators.

​For the past two years, I have steadfastly insisted that I was neither for nor against the Common Core standards. I was agnostic. I wanted to see how they worked in practice. I wanted to know, based on evidence, whether or not they improve education and whether they reduce or increase the achievement gaps among different racial and ethnic groups.

After much deliberation, I have come to the conclusion that I can’t wait five or ten years to find out whether test scores go up or down, whether or not schools improve, and whether the kids now far behind are worse off than they are today.

I have come to the conclusion that the Common Core standards effort is fundamentally flawed by the process with which they have been foisted upon the nation.

President Obama and Secretary Duncan often say that the Common Core standards were developed by the states and voluntarily adopted by them. This is not true.

They were developed by an organization called Achieve and the National Governors Association, both of which were generously funded by the Gates Foundation. There was minimal public engagement in the development of the Common Core. Their creation was neither grassroots nor did it emanate from the states.



Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association, initially supported Common Core but then withdrew his support. He said:

I am sure it won’t come as a surprise to hear that in far too many states, implementation has been completely botched. Seven of ten teachers believe that implementation of the standards is going poorly in their schools. Worse yet, teachers report that there has been little to no attempt to allow educators to share what’s needed to get CCSS implementation right. In fact, two thirds of all teachers report that they have not even been asked how to implement these new standards in their classrooms.

Imagine that: The very people expected to deliver universal access to high quality standards with high quality instruction have not had the opportunity to share their expertise and advice about how to make CCSS implementation work for all students, educators, and parents.

Consequently, NEA members have a right to feel frustrated, upset, and angry about the poor commitment to implementing the standards correctly.



Other individuals and groups opposed to Common Core, according to the Sacramento Bee newspaper:

The push against Common Core features the usual antagonists of President Barack Obama, like Sens. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who have accused the administration of strong-arming 45 states into accepting it. Conservative groups like the Republican National Committee and the Heritage Foundation -- which has dedicated an entire web page to criticizing it -- have joined the chorus of criticism.

The Common Core opposition, however, includes some traditional allies of the Obama administration, including parent-teacher organizations in a state that voted overwhelmingly for the president’s re-election, and the National Education Association (NEA), one of the country’s most powerful teachers’ unions.

From US News:

Although organizations like the Badass Teacher, an ad-hoc educators’ group, now stand with political machines like FreedomWorks -- a conservative and libertarian organization that poured money into the 2012 presidential election to try and defeat Obama -- their reasons for fighting Common Core depends on whom you ask.

But FreedomWorks and other powerful conservative groups, like the Cato Institute, Americans for Prosperity and the Koch Brothers, have launched plans to stoke populist anger over Common Core and channel it into a national political force.



Joy Pullmann is an outspoken critic of Common Core. She is managing editor of School Reform News and an education research fellow at the Heartland Institute. She made one of the best summaries of Common Core in this statement that appears in her Policy Brief on Common Core:

"People who characterize Common Core as anything other than a national takeover of schooling are either unaware of these sweeping implications or are deliberately hiding this information from the public."



On the National Review website, she criticizes Kathleen Porter-McGee and Sol Stern for their support of Common Core:

The pair deceptively wrote that the Obama administration “has stated that adoption of ‘college and career readiness standards’ doesn’t necessarily mean adoption of Common Core,” but failed to mention that no standards but Common Core fit the administration's definition of such standards. If the president has his way, states will lose federal money for setting their own standards, as they already were refused access to “Race to the Top” stimulus dollars if they refused Common Core. In January’s State of the Union address, President Obama said these federal grants “convinced almost every state” to adopt Common Core. Despite these realities, Stern and Porter-Magee fatuously assert, states can definitely set their own education standards — just as states can set their own drinking ages.

They also claim, inconsistently, that Common Core is “not a curriculum” and that it will promulgate “an academic curriculum based on great works of Western civilization and the American republic.” The standards essentially define the table of contents for all U.S. K–12 math and English texts. This may not constitute a curriculum, but it certainly defines what kids will and will not learn, especially when paired with two sets of national tests. And why should a centrally controlled, taxpayer-funded, unaccountable-to-the-public set of committees have the power to define what nearly every U.S. school child will learn?

There is no evidence Common Core will improve education. It’s never been field-tested, and research suggests education standards have no effect on student learning: Many states with high standards have low achievement, and vice versa.So why this horrific waste of time? Is it for the national student databases of test scores, hobbies, family income, voting status, health records, and more?



Brad McQueen is an Arizona educator who was involved with evaluating the English standards. He quickly became an outspoken opponent.

My turning point came when in answer to questions I had about a student writing sample, my Common Core handler blurted out, “We don’t ever care what the kids’ opinions are. If they write what they think or put forth their opinion then they will fail the test.”

I have always taught my students to think for themselves. They are to study multiple views on a given topic, then take their own position and support it with evidence. “That is the old way of writing,” my Common Core handler sighed. “We want students to repeat the opinions of the ‘experts’ that we expose them to on the test. This is the ‘new’ way of writing with the Common Core."

I discovered later that this was not just some irritated, rogue Common Core handler, rather this was a philosophy I heard repeated again and again. I pointed out that this was not the way that teachers teach in the classroom. She retorted that, “We expect that when the test comes out the teachers in the classroom will imitate the skills emphasized on the test (teach to the test) and employ this new way of writing and thinking."

The Common Core is much bigger than just a set of standards, a test, or a data gathering machine. Like a virus, the Common Core tricks its victims into lowering their guard by pretending to be something it is not. But the Common Core isn’t just a mindless infection of our society; rather it is an intentional takeover of our education delivery system and therefore a takeover of our children’s minds. It is a one-size-fits-all, homogenized, centrally controlled education delivery system steeped in Progressive ideology. It is antithetical to everything that makes our country exceptional. This cult is relentlessly pulling our children under its control, with a seemingly endless supply of money, and uses intimidation to silence its opponents.

About his involvement in the CC, he said, "we were just window dressing so that they could check the box that 'teachers were involved.'”



Among the politicians opposing CCSSI is Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal who recently signed an executive order to block the use of tests tied to Common Core education standards in his state, a position favored by tea party supporters and conservatives. He said he would continue to fight against the administration’s attempts to implement Common Core.

“The federal government has no role, no right and no place dictating standards in our local schools across these 50 states of the United States of America,” Jindal said.

Who Benefits?

Certainly many groups and individuals will benefit from Common Core – too many to list. But here are some of the most noticeable beneficiaries.

According to , here's their comment on who stands to win:

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Bill and Melinda Gates are directly tied to the United Nations, and they will directly benefit from the software packages that are sold to train teachers in the classroom through Microsoft.

Publishing Companies- Pearson, Scholastic News,MacGraw Hill, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, etc., will benefit from Common Core because they will provide the textbooks, for training teachers and teaching students, and curriculum changes that will need to be made to implement Common Core. Pearson, the largest on-line book company in the world, announced in their 2012 Earnings Report that "The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC)...awarded Pearson and Educational Testing Service (ETS) the contract to develop test items that will be part of the new English and Mathematics assessments to be administered from the 2014-2015 school year."

According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution website:

Two national consortia, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) and Smarter Balanced, having gotten a combined $346 million in federal education grants to create a pair of new standardized tests tied to Common Core. “These people all know each other,” said Michael T. Moore, a literacy professor at Georgia Southern University who has written extensively about Common Core. “It is a private club.”



In addition to these grants, PARCC gets to charge the states for the testing materials. Christian website reported:

Further, the accompanying tests, developed by the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, known as the PARCC national testing consortium, will create such testing demands that this will probably become better known as No Child Left Behind on steroids. Scott informed us that the PARCC will cost approximately $30 to $37 per student, in comparison to Georgia’s current costs of between $5 to $10 per student. These estimates do not take into account the additional technology, both in hardware and bandwidth, that will be required at the local level for online testing.



Some excerpts in this report have been slightly edited for brevity and clarity.

Special Report: The Connection Between

Common Core and George Soros

A number of people are making a connection between Common Core and a huge financial backer of projects capable of harming human beings, George Soros. If you're not familiar with Mr. Soros, you can read this article about Mr. Soros and his desire for a New World Order:



The Noisy Room, a conservative blog addressing international, national and local topics including terrorism and education, said:

I will tell you that George Soros and the Tides Foundation along with other major Progressive organizations and the Obama Administration are behind all of this monstrosity.



Glenn Beck has spoken out repeatedly against Common Core and in fact, wrote an entire book on education in America, including Common Core. He also mentions Soros and the Tides Foundation. From his website:

Think Common Core is bad – wait until you hear about Imagining America, a national consortium of 90 campuses that Glenn believes could be America’s next progressive propaganda machine.

Imagining America was created through the White House Millennium Council, which was initiated under Bill Clinton in 1998 through an executive order. Their membership includes over 90 universities, including Columbia, NYU, Brown, University of Chicago, University of Washington, and UC Santa Barbara—all of whom receive grants from the Tides Foundation.

Using publicly available video, Glenn showed what some of the people involved want to do with the program. They discussed changing the face of government by getting radicals to run for office and involved with changing policy. They discussed redistribution of wealth, inequality, and oppression.

Many of their members have ties to George Soros. Pam Korza, for example, an advisory board member, is actually the co-director of the Soros-funded Animating Democracy. Other members have written progressive texts and have ties to a wide range of connections including government organizations, universities, corporations, and more.



Who is The Tides Foundation? To start with, what the conservative website says about them:

Established in 1976 by California-based activist Drummond Pike, the Tides Foundation was set up as a public charity that receives money from donors and then funnels it to the recipients of their choice. Because many of these recipient groups are quite radical, the donors often prefer not to have their names publicly linked with the donees. By letting the Tides Foundation, in effect, “launder” the money for them and pass it along to the intended beneficiaries, donors can avoid leaving a “paper trail.” Such contributions are called "donor-advised," or donor-directed, funds.

Through this legal loophole, nonprofit entities can also create for-profit organizations and then funnel money to them through Tides – thereby circumventing the laws that bar nonprofits from directly funding their own for-profit enterprises. Pew Charitable Trusts, for instance, set up three for-profit media companies and then proceeded to fund them via donor-advised contributions to Tides, which (for an 8 percent management fee) in turn sent the money to the media companies.

If a donor wishes to give money to a particular cause but finds that there is no organization in existence dedicated specifically to that issue, the Tides Foundation will, for a fee, create a group to meet that perceived need.



How is Soros connected with the Tides Foundation? Discover the Networks further describes the connection.

Immediately after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Tides formed a "9/11 Fund" to advocate a "peaceful national response." Tides later replaced the 9/11 Fund with the "Democratic Justice Fund," which was financed in large measure by the Open Society Institute of George Soros, who has donated more than $7 million to Tides over the years. Reciprocally, the Tides Foundation is a major funder of the Shadow Party, a George Soros-conceived nationwide network of several dozen unions, non-profit activist groups, and think tanks whose agendas are ideologically to the left, and which are engaged in campaigning for the Democrats.



Western Journalism is another conservative organization dedicated to monitoring elements in our country that they consider destructive or dangerous. They describe themselves this way: is a blogging platform built for conservative, libertarian, free market and pro-family writers and broadcasters by the Western Center for Journalism (WCJ).

On their website, they talk about the Tides Foundation and George Soros.

Very few Americans realize there exists a large network of far left philanthropists and foundations in America dedicated to destroying the American way of life, our Christian-based culture and our free enterprise system. They seek to remove America from its constitutional foundations and move it toward a European-style socialism. Much of this effort is coordinated by a little known group called the Tides Foundation and its related group, the Tides Center. Over the course of its 33 year history, the Tides network has given hundreds of millions of dollars to anti-free enterprise groups, gun control groups, anti-private property groups, abortion rights groups, homosexual groups, groups engaged in voter fraud, anti-military groups, and organizations that seek to destroy America’s constitutional basis. All told, over 100 leftist organizations have received funding from one of the two Tides groups.

Soros is an eccentric billionaire who has been funding anti-American groups and causes for a decade. He was convicted of insider trading in France in 2005 and is the leading force behind the effort to legalize all drugs. While he is the founder of the Open Society organization, he hides a great deal of his wealth in offshore banks considered havens for money laundering. He has given more than $7 million to the Tides Foundation. Tides founder Drummond Pike serves as the treasurer for Soros’s Democracy Alliance, a major funder of ACORN.

Rockefeller Foundation: They have been funding the left in America for 40 years, so this is no surprise.

Other large Tides donors include: the Pew Charitable Trust, the James Irvine Foundation, Citigroup Foundation, Kellogg Foundation, Hearst Foundation, Fannie Mae Foundation, JP Morgan Foundation, Bank America Foundation, Chase Manhattan Foundation, Verizon Foundation, David & Lucile Packard Foundation, AT & T Foundation, Bell Atlantic Foundation, Citicorp Foundation, ARCO Foundation, US West Foundation, John D. MacArthur Foundation, ALCOA Foundation, Richard King Mellon Foundation, and the Carnegie Foundation.



The Washington Examiner further describes the way that the Tides Foundation funnels money along secret channels.

Dark money is funding provided at arm's length, usually through a third party such as a trust, so that the donor’s identity is more difficult to determine. The usual bogeymen in dark-money media coverage are wealthy conservatives and libertarians like the Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson and Richard DeVos. Because they can shroud their contributions in secrecy, the Left’s narrative goes, they represent a threat to democracy.

Another frequent target of such criticism is the American Legislative Exchange Council, which allegedly is a front for evil corporate interests determined to feather their own nests at public expense in the state legislatures. As the Washington Examiner's Morning Examiner recently pointed out, however, ALEC's critics hate to admit the group also receives substantial funding from non-profit entities like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts and the Lumina Foundation for Education.

Whenever “ALEC” and “dark money” are mentioned in the media, however, there ought to be a third name given at least equal attention – the Tides Foundation. That's because Tides, the San Francisco-based funder of virtually every liberal activist group in existence since the mid-1970s, pioneered the concept of providing a cut-out for donors who don’t wish to be associated in public with a particular cause. It is instructive to compare the funding totals for Tides and ALEC.

A search of non-profit grant databases reveals 139 grants worth a total of $5.6 million to ALEC since 1998. By comparison, Tides is the Mega-Goliath of dark money cash flows. Tides received 1,976 grants worth a total of $451 million during the same period, or nearly 100 times as much money as ALEC. But even that’s not the whole story with Tides, which unlike ALEC, has divided and multiplied over the years. Add to the Tides Foundation total the directly linked Tides Center's 465 grants with a combined worth of $62 million, and the total is well over half a billion dollars.



ALEC has been mentioned many times in connection with Common Core. Like from the Ring of Fire Radio website:

In 2010, the United States adopted the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI), purportedly to streamline states’ education curricula using standards-based education reform principles. The controversial decision to implement national educational content standards has been referred to as an “uncommonly bad idea” for American education by many. Recently, educator and education advocate Morna McDermott has illuminated the initiative’s extensive corporate ties, many stemming from the American Legislative Exchange Council.

McDermott, an associate professor in the College of Education at Towson University, has mapped out CCSSI’s corporate connections in a flowchart. Her chart shows that many corporations and organizations that are members of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) have “funded and perpetuated Common Core standards throughout the states.”



A transcript from a video of McDermott discussing the background and connections of Common Core and this chart appear near the end of this report.

The Tides Foundation is a direct and open supporter of Common Core. The foundation used a special pool of money called the Grade Level Reading Fund used to fund PBS shows on Common Core. It's difficult, really, to find anything at all about this fund. It's also hard to find anyone who benefits from this fund other than Learning Matters, a non-profit that produces pro-Common Core videos for PBS NewsHour and documentaries for PBS. The website for Education Week features podcasts from Learning Matters on their website.

From their Facebook page:

Learning Matters is generously supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Wallace Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki Foundation, the Grade Level Reading Fund of the Tides Foundation, and The Hastings/Quillin Fund, an advised fund of Silicon Valley Community Foundation.



The YouTube channel for Learning Matters productions includes these features:

Why Education Secretary Duncan is Under Fire

Are Private Charter Schools Monopolizing Public Resources?

Certification Test Focuses on Readying Students for Work

The Gates Foundation is also connected to the Tides Foundation. The Tides Foundation is on the list as receiving funding from The Gates Foundation.

The Gates Foundation is so enormous that the financial portion of its 990-PF form submitted to the IRS, which lists all of its investments, fills nearly 1,500 pages. While the Foundation’s grantmaking is by no means exclusively targeted toward the political left, among the groups it supports are: the Aspen Institute; the Carter Center; the Council on Foundations; Global Justice; the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP); the National Council of La Raza; Physicians for Human Rights; Planned Parenthood; the Progressive Policy Institute; the Tides Center and the Tides Foundation; the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF); the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs; the United Nations Foundation; the United States Student Association; the Urban League; the World Resources Institute; and World Vision International.



Additional Information on the

Pharmaceutical Connection to Common Core

An extensive article in the New York Times, published October 15, 2013, illuminated the connection between education and increasing diagnosis of ADHD. This article refers to a connection between President George W. Bush's educational program No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Many people consider NCLB a failed forerunner of Common Core. This was an early program that has been described as having made a dramatic shift in teach attention from real education to "teaching to the test" – in other words, teaching children only what they need to know to score well on state examinations. Excerpts from this New York Times article appear below.

1 The Not-So-Hidden Cause Behind the ADHD Epidemic

The beginning of A.D.H.D. as an “epidemic” corresponds with a couple of important policy changes that incentivized diagnosis. The incorporation of A.D.H.D. under the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act in 1991 — and a subsequent overhaul of the Food and Drug Administration in 1997 that allowed drug companies to more easily market directly to the public — were hugely influential, according to Adam Rafalovich, a sociologist at Pacific University in Oregon. For the first time, the diagnosis came with an upside — access to tutors, for instance, and time allowances on standardized tests. By the late 1990s, as more parents and teachers became aware that A.D.H.D. existed, and that there were drugs to treat it, the diagnosis became increasingly normalized, until it was viewed by many as just another part of the experience of childhood.

Stephen Hinshaw, a professor of psychology at University of California, Berkeley, has found another telling correlation. Hinshaw was struck by the disorder’s uneven geographical distribution. In 2007, 15.6 percent of kids between the ages of 4 and 17 in North Carolina had at some point received an A.D.H.D. diagnosis. In California, that number was 6.2 percent. This disparity between the two states is representative of big differences, generally speaking, in the rates of diagnosis between the South and West. Even after Hinshaw’s team accounted for differences like race and income, they still found that kids in North Carolina were nearly twice as likely to be given diagnoses of A.D.H.D. as those in California.

Hinshaw, as well as sociologists like Rafalovich and Peter Conrad of Brandeis University, argues that such numbers are evidence of sociological influences on the rise in A.D.H.D. diagnoses. In trying to narrow down what those influences might be, Hinshaw evaluated differences between diagnostic tools, types of health insurance, cultural values and public perceptions of mental illness. Nothing seemed to explain the difference — until he looked at educational policies.

The No Child Left Behind Act, signed into law by President George W. Bush, was the first federal effort to link school financing to standardized-test performance. But various states had been slowly rolling out similar policies for the last three decades. North Carolina was one of the first to adopt such a program; California was one of the last. The correlations between the implementation of these laws and the rates of A.D.H.D. diagnosis matched on a regional scale as well. When Hinshaw compared the rollout of these school policies with incidences of A.D.H.D., he found that when a state passed laws punishing or rewarding schools for their standardized-test scores, A.D.H.D. diagnoses in that state would increase not long afterward. Nationwide, the rates of A.D.H.D. diagnosis increased by 22 percent in the first four years after No Child Left Behind was implemented.

To be clear: Those are correlations, not causal links. But A.D.H.D., education policies, disability protections and advertising freedoms all appear to wink suggestively at one another. From parents’ and teachers’ perspectives, the diagnosis is considered a success if the medication improves kids’ ability to perform on tests and calms them down enough so that they’re not a distraction to others.

Today many sociologists and neuroscientists believe that regardless of A.D.H.D.’s biological basis, the explosion in rates of diagnosis is caused by sociological factors — especially ones related to education and the changing expectations we have for kids. During the same 30 years when A.D.H.D. diagnoses increased, American childhood drastically changed. Even at the grade-school level, kids now have more homework, less recess and a lot less unstructured free time to relax and play. It’s easy to look at that situation and speculate how “A.D.H.D.” might have become a convenient societal catchall for what happens when kids are expected to be miniature adults. High-stakes standardized testing, increased competition for slots in top colleges, a less-and-less accommodating economy for those who don’t get into colleges but can no longer depend on the existence of blue-collar jobs — all of these are expressed through policy changes and cultural expectations, but they may also manifest themselves in more troubling ways — in the rising number of kids whose behavior has become pathologized.



Effects of Common Core

The Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI) impacts the students, the teachers required to implement these standards and parents who are trying to help their children achieve good educations. Strictly speaking, Common Core consists only of the standards of what should be achieved in each grade, but these standards require a change of curriculum to meet them. Individual lessons must be created to deliver the curriculum. Yearly testing to ensure the standards are met also must align with the standards. College entrance exams must measure accomplishments of the same standards. Therefore, the CCSSI permeates every aspect of public school and higher education life. It means a complete, ground-up shift in teaching that no child, teacher or parent was prepared for or warned about.

In the Common Core system, computers are being or will be used to analyze language in study materials for the curriculums or even for test answers. Here is one person's observation on the way texts are selected for different grade levels.

Here’s a pop quiz: according to the measurements used in the new Common Core Standards, which of these books would be complex enough for a ninth grader?

a. Huckleberry Finn

b. To Kill a Mockingbird

c. Jane Eyre

d. Sports Illustrated for Kids' Awesome Athletes!

The only correct answer is “d,” since all the others have a “Lexile” score so low that they are deemed most appropriate for fourth, fifth, or sixth graders. This idea might seem ridiculous, but it’s based on a metric that is transforming the way American schools teach reading.

Lexiles were developed in the 1980s by Malbert Smith and A. Jackson Stenner, the President and CEO of the MetaMetrics corporation, who decided that education, unlike science, lacked “what philosophers of science call unification of measurement,” and aimed to demonstrate that “common scales, like Fahrenheit and Celsius, could be built for reading.” Their final product is a proprietary algorithm that analyzes sentence length and vocabulary to assign a “Lexile” score from 0 to over 1,600 for the most complex texts. And now the new Common Core State Standards, the U.S. education initative that aims to standardize school curricula, have adopted Lexiles to determine what books are appropriate for students in each grade level. Publishers have also taken note: more than 200 now submit their books for measurement, and various apps and websites match students precisely to books on their personal Lexile level.



A second grade teacher described the result of her year-end testing in circuitous terms since teachers are not allowed to distribute Common Core materials outside the classroom.

Nothing could have adequately prepared these 8-year-olds for the testing they were subjected to last week. As many other teachers have reported, the multiple-choice questions (and answer choices) were so complex and nonsensical that many adults struggled to determine the right answers. One of the reasons I actually support certain parts the Common Core is due to the emphasis on getting kids to go beyond the surface level of a text, but none of these questions tested their ability to do that. Instead of a question like: “What caused the character to (insert action here) in the middle of the story?” (which, mind you, is hard enough for an 8-year-old to identify as it is), there were questions like: “In Line 8 of Paragraph 4, the character says … and in Line 17 of Paragraph 5, the character does … Which of the following lines from Paragraph 7 best supports the character’s actions?” This, followed by four choices of lines from Paragraph 7 that could all, arguably, show motivation for the character’s actions in the preceding paragraphs. Additionally, MANY of the questions on the third-grade tests were aligned with fifth-grade standards (especially related to the structure of the text itself, rather than its meaning), and did not address the third-grade expectations. I wish I could give you more than hypotheticals, but teachers aren’t allowed to publicize test material.

During the test, my readers, who months ago couldn’t get their noses out of books, complained of stomach aches as they persevered and tried to read texts that were over their heads and had no relevance to their lives, age, or backgrounds. They struggled to hold their heads up and were doing hand stretches at the 60-minute mark as they tried to do what they were taught, what they know how to do—to back up their ideas with strong text evidence. But at the end of the day, their close reading and thinking put them at a disadvantage because they barely had enough time to finish writing about topics and texts that not only were inappropriate for their age and developmental level, but that they would never, EVER encounter in their reading lives, inside of school or out. My kids are now totally fried and frustrated, and so am I. Worst of all, these tests are turning reading and writing into chores, into something that more closely resembles punishment than it does a way to enrich thinking. This is sucking the life and love out of their young literary lives.



At a website called Testing Talk, teachers shared their frustrations:

“It is not a valid measure of students’ reading comprehension,” wrote one frustrated teacher concerning the questions and, particularly, the appalling array of answer choices.

“There were several that I did not know exactly which choice was correct and could have justified an answer for all the choices and I’m a reading specialist and have been teaching for 24 years, so how are kids supposed to do this?”

A third-grade teacher calling herself Rebecca concurred, saying:

“There were questions I believed could have had two or three answers.”

Rebecca and many other teachers also criticized the test writers for their inability to ask grade-level appropriate questions. “One question seemed to have been worded for high school or college students,” she complained. “Even my strongest students (students reading at almost a 5th grade level) got stumped and frustrated by this exam. I did as well.”

A fourth-grade teacher, Megan, agreed.

“Students spent so much time trying to decipher strangely worded questions, only to discover that two answer choices sort of fit what the question was sort of asking,” she said.

While the multiple-choice questions were awful, a set of “vague and unreasonably difficult” questions requiring written responses caused even more misery.



More stories from the standardized test administration:

Elena, a teacher, said her students felt confused and depressed.

“There were so many frustrated sighs in the room from kids who had worked so hard for so many months and were made to feel stupid as they struggled through this unfair and unreasonable test.”

“According to the proctor who administered the ELA test in my room, one student began hyperventilating, cried and reported that her heart ‘was pounding,’” wrote a teacher calling herself Brenda. “On day two, one of my students came in that morning telling me that she had had a nightmare about failing the test. On day three, one of my students sobbed because he couldn’t read the passage.”

In another instance, the parent of a New York City first-grader logged onto Testing Talk to reveal that she had to bring a change of clothes to school because her son had wet his pants because of the standardized test.

“When I arrived, I found him crying and soaked to his socks,” the outraged parent explained. “As I was helping him get changed, I asked him what had happened and he told me his teacher told him he couldn’t go to the bathroom.

"When I asked her to explain the situation, she said that she made an announcement in the morning that they would have to limit their bathroom breaks because of ‘the state tests’ and they would be expected to go during lunchtime.”



My speech teacher came to see me. She was both angry and distraught. In her hand was her 6-year-old’s math test. On the top of it was written, “Topic 2, 45%”. On the bottom, were the words, “Copyright @ Pearson Education.” After I got over my horror that a first-grader would take a multiple-choice test with a percent-based grade, I started to look at the questions.

The test provides insight into why New York State parents are up in arms about testing and the Common Core. With mom’s permission, I posted the test here. Take a look at question No. 1, which shows students five pennies, under which it says “part I know,” and then a full coffee cup labeled with a “6″ and, under it, the word, “Whole.” Students are asked to find “the missing part” from a list of four numbers. My assistant principal for mathematics was not sure what the question was asking. How could pennies be a part of a cup?

Please see the illustration of this lesson on the next page.

Then there is Question No. 12. Would (or should) a 6 year old understand the question, “Which is a related subtraction sentence?” My nephew’s wife, who teaches Calculus, was stumped by that one. Finally, think about the level of sophistication required to answer the multiple-choice question in No. 8 which asks students to “Circle the number sentence that is true” from a list of four.



From Debra Silverman, a teacher:

This ritual that we are putting our children through, mandated, promoted and endorsed by the state…should be illegal! Put 20 or more 8-10 year olds in a room (well-ventilated, of course) for 90 minutes plus 20 minutes of test directions (really now) and set-up and what do you get? A situation equivalent to hazing on college campuses.

Third graders have the honor of first year initiation rites. Is this the rite of passage we want our children to remember? To have to endure? Or do we want them to treasure reading, steeped in places with people far, far away from test-prep land?

We know that “the test” goes against everything we stand for. We do not engage in hazing rituals or tolerating them. Yet, in the past 3 days (just this year) there have been episodes of crying, sobbing uncontrollably, panic attacks and more. Students used to producing highly organized and thorough writing were watching the clock, biting their nails and twiddling their hair incessantly while anxiously writing and hoping they would finish in time. Some were so exhausted that they needed inspiring references to the 2014 Olympic games to continue and cross the “finish line.” Where are their gold medals? Is this what we want for OUR children? Parents do not send their children to school to be initiated into this twisted turmoil.

In response to this comment, another teacher said:

Last year, at my school, a 3rd grader threw up while taking the state test. My (thankfully former) principal determined that the right thing to do was to leave the rest of the class in the room still taking the test without cleaning up the vomit because she didn't want to alter the testing environment in fear that all of the tests would be invalidated. She relayed this to the staff as a "funny thing that happened during testing." Crazy thinking promotes and encourages more crazy thinking.



A teacher from Utah provided this parent feedback:

Here’s a letter I got from a parent just a few days ago.

“Good morning,

I am passing this on to you because I believe you can reach more people than I can. This morning my son was to take his 8th Grade writing assessment. Knowing that this would most likely be an assignment where he was asked to write about his opinion on something, I went down to the school and talked to the English teacher. She told me that in the past, the topics had been things like whether or not students should be allowed to wear hats at school or what their opinion was on school uniforms. Another asked an opinion about using paper or plastic shopping bags. However, she was not allowed to see the actual prompt before or after the assessment in past years or this year. She was nice, but unconcerned. After visiting a while, she was willing to let me be in the room and look over my son’s shoulder as the prompt appeared after log in. One look and I let her know that my son would not be participating in the assessment. She was polite and said that was fine. While not revealing the actual topic of the assessment, I will share that it very clearly asked for an opinion regarding the role of parents vs. the role of government and other organizations on a topic that I would say should most definitely fall under the parental realm. Heads up to parents of all 8th graders in the state of Utah!

Common Core opponent Diane Ravitch published a letter from a father who was upset about a his son's education in New York:

It is time for parents to speak out against the Common Core standards. They are destroying the love of learning in our children. My eight-year old son is in the third grade. He is a very strong student, particularly in Mathematics. Despite that strength, he recently had a homework assignment from his Common Core Math workbook that frustrated him to tears. The word problem involved many steps including reading and understanding the problem, interpreting what needs to be done to solve it, subtracting three digit numbers, estimating each number’s tenth place value before subtracting and then coming up with an answer that matched an estimated answer. The problem was far too complex for a third grader. Instead of being excited about doing Math homework like he used to be, he now frequently says, “I don’t get this. It doesn’t make sense.” He’s right. It doesn’t.

Parents in my suburban community are sharing similar anecdotes and seeing similar effects on their children. They are angry and expect better. They have watched their older children successfully navigate our schools and be very well prepared for college. They know that the scores are not an accurate measure. Their children deserve a well-researched curriculum that is appropriate at every level and does not confuse or frustrate their children to tears. Our children are now experiencing heightened levels of stress, anxiety, confusion, lowered self-esteem and a lack of interest in school. It is frequently being called, “Common Core Disorder.”

If the reason that the Common Core is being implemented is to increase the numbers of students who are not college and career ready coming out of high school, then why are schools with extremely high percentages of students going to college being subjected to this? If strong students are finding this curriculum to be confusing, how are students with special needs and English language learners going to understand it? If there are students who lack the basic skills to prepare them for college, shouldn’t we have a curriculum that stresses those skills, not one that makes it impossible for them to succeed? Many parents are questioning the motives behind the Common Core. Some have suggested that it is a way to help destroy public school education and for big businesses to profit off of poor results of State exams. I’m not entirely sure, but one thing is certain. The crying and frustration must end. We are raising a generation of students for whom education has become punishment.



Data Collection and Privacy Problems

Why do we have Common Core? In part because big business has discovered the profit potential of education as illustrated in this quote from American Thinker: "Reuters reported that in 2012 technology startups for the K-12 market attracted more than $425 million in venture capital. Rupert Murdoch, owner of Amplify Education, one of the country's largest education technology companies, estimates that K-12 education is a $500 billion sector in the U.S. alone."



Pearson, the international textbook producer tied in to Common Core, has a Board of Directors mostly drawn from British banking. Microsoft stands to earn billions of dollars from the technology investments that will be required by every school system in the country to deliver the curriculum and process the standardized testing.

By 2016, the test creators have said, the tests must be taken exclusively online, which is more expensive and troublesome than current test procedures, especially for rural and poorer schools. Online testing requires not only hardware - computers, tech labs, earphones, and microphones - but Internet connections, newer operating systems, and tech support.



But there is a deeper financial motivation that could be at work as well. The Common Core plan includes includes a data collection plan called State Longitudinal Data System (SLDS). Here's a look at what the SLDS is.

The program provides grants to states to design, develop, and implement statewide P-20* longitudinal data systems to capture, analyze, and use student data from preschool to high school, college, and the workforce.



*P-20: early learning, K12, postsecondary, and workforce, also referred to as P-20W.

If you ask a Common Core advocate if there is any data collection involved in the Common Core standards, he will say: "Common Core State Standards does not require data collection. Standards define expectations for what students should know and be able to do by the end of each grade. The means of assessing students and the data that result from those assessments are up to the discretion of each state and are separate and unique from the Common Core."



However, US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said:

Hopefully, some day, we can track children from preschool to high school and from high school to college and college to career . . . . We want to see more states build comprehensive systems that track students from pre-K through college and then link school data to workforce data. We want to know know whether Johnny participated in an early learning program and then completed college on time and whether those things have any bearing on his earnings as an adult.



About the SLDS, the website stated:

The national data collection system (SLDS) will follow a child from Kindergarten to adulthood. A student’s IQ scores, test scores, and his disciplinary and medical records will become part of the collected data which will help determine educational and job opportunities afforded each student.



But mandating data collection as part of national standards could be illegal according to the Family and Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (FERPA). Here's the basic information on FERPA – at least as FERPA used to be:

The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (FERPA) is a Federal law that protects the privacy of student education records. The law applies to all schools that receive funds under an applicable program of the U.S. Department of Education. FERPA deals specifically with the education records of students, affording them certain rights with respect to those records. For purposes of definition, education records are those records which are:

Directly related to a student and

Maintained by an institution or a party acting for the institution.

How to get around this law? There are two solutions.

The first: The website Truth in American Education explains one solution, referring to Arne Duncan, US Secretary of Education:

Now the problem here, from Duncan’s point of view, is that a federal statute prohibits maintaining a national student database (20 U.S.C § 7911). What to do? What the federal government has chosen to do – and this predates the Obama Administration – is to incentivize the states to build identical databases so that the data can be easily shared. We end up with a de facto national student database.



The second: Change the law.

In April 2011, the U.S. Department of Education(ED) issued a notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM), inviting public comments on its proposed regulations amending the Family and Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (FERPA). The proposed regulations removed limitations prohibiting educational institutions and agencies from disclosing student personally identifiable information, without first obtaining student or parental consent. For example, the proposed FERPA regulations reinterpreted FERPA statutory terms "authorized representative," "education program," and "directory information." This reinterpretation gives non-governmental actors increased access to student personal data.



Fighting these changes and the threat to privacy is EPIC, the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C. EPIC filed their comments with the Education Department, stating the illegality of the plans.

EPIC's comments stated that by designating non-governmental actors as "authorized representatives" of state educational institutions, the Education Department would perform an "unauthorized, unlawful sub-delegation of its own authority." EPIC's comments further stated that by expanding the definition of "educational programs," the Education Department would expose "troves of sensitive, non-academic data." EPIC's comments stated that the proposed regulations permitting schools to "disclose publicly student ID numbers that are displayed on individuals cards or badges . . . insufficiently safeguard students from the risks of re-identification." EPIC recommended to the Education Department that the proposed regulations should be withdrawn because they were contrary to law and exceeded the scope of the agency's rulemaking authority.

The Education Department continued with their plans, so:

On February 29, 2012, EPIC filed a lawsuit under the Administrative Procedure Act against the ED. EPIC's lawsuit argues that the agency's December 2011 regulations amending the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act exceed the agency's statutory authority, and are contrary to law.



If this data collection scheme comes to full fruition, there is a very real risk of security breaches. It's already occurred in a Minnesota database.

Last year, a Minnesota legislative auditor discovered the state’s education department’s “mammoth computer systems … lacked ‘adequate internal controls’ and comprehensive security plans,” and that bureaucrats had “failed to document where private (student) data was held or the internal controls to secure it,” according to EAGnews.

These kids are sitting ducks for hackers, and trust me, the bureaucrats will just shrug their shoulders when it happens. They’ll probably blame a lack of funding, too.



Or consider the incompetence of administrators in Chicago Public Schools. It was reported in December 2013 that the medical information of about 2,000 students was posted on the school’s website. It had been there since the summer and no bureaucrat had realized it.

And in another incident noted on The Blaze website:

Last fall, a teenage hacker was arrested and charged with felony computer trespass after he allegedly “accessed and downloaded the records of thousands in 2012 and 2013.” The hacker allegedly posted the information, which “included student identification numbers and information on free lunch plans,” to online message boards.



What kind of data is to be collected in this system? It's not just grades and test scores. The official list of data to be collected is listed here:

An unique identifier for every student that does not permit a student to be individually identified (except as permitted by federal and state law);

The school enrollment history, demographic characteristics, and program participation record of every student;

Information on when a student enrolls, transfers, drops out, or graduates from a school;

Students scores on tests required by the Elementary and Secondary Education Act;

Information on students who are not tested, by grade and subject;

Students scores on tests measuring whether they’re ready for college;

A way to identify teachers and to match teachers to their students;

Information from students’ transcripts, specifically courses taken and grades earned;

Data on students’ success in college, including whether they enrolled in remedial courses;

Data on whether K-12 students are prepared to succeed in college;

A system of auditing data for quality, validity, and reliability; and

The ability to share data from preschool through postsecondary education data systems.



Once the capability for data collection and storage is established, the possibilities are endless. The following report describes some of the other information that can be collected and used as part of this system.

Parents might reasonably assume that the “personally identifiable information” collected for the database will include students' test scores and perhaps other measures of academic proficiency. But they would be much less likely to imagine that the federal government envisions something far more extensive and invasive than merely tracking academic performance. According to the Department of Education’s February 2013 report Promoting Grit, Tenacity, and Perseverance: Critical Factors for Success in the 21st Century, “Researchers are exploring how to gather complex affective data* and generate meaningful and usable information to feed back to learners, teachers, researchers, and the technology itself. Connections to neuroscience are also beginning to emerge.” (Emphasis added.)



*affective data: relating to moods, feelings, and attitudes.

A paper from the Computer Science and Information Technology Center in Brazil provides a very interesting look at the kind of "social affective data" that could be mined and retained in a student's record. The ostensible purpose of this particular data-mining project was to determine which students would be suitable to be chosen as tutors. But look at the kind of information that project seeks to collect:

When students navigate in our learning environment, different types of data are collected from their interaction. By keeping the navigation history of every student, for example, we are able to identify navigation patterns and to use them in real-time recommendation of contents. For the recommendation of tutor colleagues, six other types of data are collected: Social Profile; Acceptance Degree; Sociability Degree; Mood State; Tutorial Degree and Performance.

The Social Profile is built during the communication process among students. The following information is collected during the interaction of the students through an instant message service:

Initiatives of communication: number of times that the student had the initiative to talk with other pupils.

Answers to initial communications: in an initial communication, number of times that the student answered.

Interaction history: Individuals with whom the student interacts or has interacted, and number of interactions.

Friends Groups: individuals with whom the student interacts regularly, and number interactions.



Joy Pullman of the Heartland Institute found evidence that the SLDS will retain an insidious array of information about our children. She wrote, in the Orange County Register:

The U.S. Department of Education is investigating how public schools can collect information on "non-cognitive" student attributes, after granting itself the power to share student data across agencies without parents' knowledge.

The feds want to use schools to catalogue "attributes, dispositions, social skills, attitudes and intrapersonal resources – independent of intellectual ability," according to a February DOE report, all under the guise of education.

The report suggests researching how to measure and monitor these student attributes using "data mining" techniques and even functional magnetic resonance imaging, although it concedes "devices that measure EEG and skin conductance may not be practical for use in the classroom." It delightedly discusses experiments on how kids respond to computer tutors, using cameras to judge facial expressions, an electronic seat that judges posture, a pressure-sensitive computer mouse and a biometric wrap on kids' wrists.

And that's not all the feds want to know about your kids. The department is funding and mandating databases that could expand each kid's academic records into a comprehensive personal record including "health care history, disciplinary record, family income range, family voting status and religious affiliation," according to a 2012 Pioneer Institute report and the National Center for Educational Statistics. Under agreements every state signed to get 2009 stimulus funds, they must share students' academic data with the federal government.

As Utah blogger Christel Swasey has documented, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act used to protect highly personal psychological and biological information, including items mentioned above and, according to the DOE, "fingerprints; retina and iris patterns; voiceprints; DNA sequence; facial characteristics; and handwriting."

Under the DOE's 2011 FERPA reinterpretation, however, any local, state or federal agency may designate any individual or organization as an "educational representative" who can access such data as long as the agency says this access is necessary to study or evaluate a program. These can include school volunteers and private companies. A lawsuit against the regulations is pending.

Meanwhile, several agreements the DOE has signed with two organizations writing national Common Core tests insist the information these tests collect must be "student-level" – meaning these would not be anonymous records but instead tied to specific children.



As an example of how these data can be centrally stored, the National Center on Education Statistics published this report, showing how two states have created a centralized warehouse of information. That PDF from this source will follow the McDermott transcript near the end of this report.

Outspoken Common Core critic Dr. Duke Pesta described the data mining function this way:

The mandated cooperation with Obamacare... the twenty-seven thousand page Obamacare document... there are all sorts of places in Obamacare that mandate that the schools become data and informational gathering places for your kids. This is the whole data mining component. That's the facility they just finished building last year in Utah. (image below) That's where all the data on your kids is going to be kept. That's the huge multi-billion dollar facility where all these data and records are going to be kept... Under Common Core, every single grade, every teacher comment, every conduct evaluation, every quiz grade, become part of your kid's permanent record for his entire life. And they have already said that they plan to make them available to potential employers. So, under Obamacare, your kids are kids until they are 27. So at 28, when your kid goes to get his first job [meant humorously]...they're going to be sifting through their second, third and fifth grade records.

There's this program now in public schools that's driving teachers nuts. It pre-dates Common Core but it's gotten really serious with Common Core. It's a program whose initials are PBIS*... It's basically a behavior monitoring program where every day in class, teachers have to spend time making behavioral and attitude assessments on your kids. They have to enter them in the computer every single day... and all that becomes part of the permanent record, too. That's where it's going to be housed.



*PBIS: PBIS Assessment is a web-based application designed to assist in high-fidelity, sustained implementation of school-wide positive behavioral interventions and supports (SWPBIS).

Does Common Core Affect Private Schools?

Any school that accepts federal funding will be subject to Common Core standards. This includes public schools, charter schools or virtual charter schools used in homes.

If a private school accepts federal funding – through the Individuals with Disabilities Act, for example – then they may have to choose between the funding and Common Core standards.

According to the Homeschool Legal Defense Association:

The current impact of the Common Core on home and private education is revealed in the expanding state longitudinal databases, shifting college admissions expectations, newly updated curricula, and revised standardized tests. All these are fulfilling education historian Diane Ravitch’s prediction that “no one will escape [the Common Core’s] reach, whether they attend public or private school.”

Perhaps the most immediate threat to homeschool and private school students is the expansion of statewide longitudinal databases. The designers of the new systems fully intend for homeschool and private school students to be part of the massive data collection.

Apart from the databases, we fear that the Common Core will eventually impact homeschool and private school students by affecting college admissions standards. Institutions of higher education are being pressured to adapt their standards for college readiness to the Common Core standards.



Even if a child makes it through secondary education by homeschooling or at private school, if he wishes to attend college, he will usually have to complete the SAT or a similar academic test for admission. And once in college, those curricula may have been "updated" to conform to Common Core methods of teaching. Even the GED test is being revised to conform. This is from the Homeschool Legal Defense Association:

The National Governors Association, instrumental in writing the Common Core, compiled a guide for states to use while implementing the Common Core. The document emphasizes that the Common Core standards for college readiness will be used by institutions of higher learning to determine whether a student is ready to enroll in a postsecondary course. Achieve, one of the main organizations evaluating the Common Core, even exhorts institutions of higher education to revise their curricula to create “seamless transitions” from K–12 to postsecondary schools.

In a 2012 policy brief, the Illinois State Board of Education emphasized the need to seamlessly connect high school and college education by streamlining the curriculum taught to high school seniors and college freshmen according to the Common Core. Though Illinois encouraged state universities to share with state high schools what kind of material students will be expected to know in their first year of college, nothing indicates that homeschools or private schools would be privy to the same information. This movement to standardize post-secondary academic standards reveals that the Common Core’s emphases and methods will permeate American education beyond elementary and secondary public schools.

The final area of concern for homeschoolers is that national and other popular standardized tests across the country are being rewritten to be aligned to the Common Core. David Coleman, the president of the College Board, was one of the primary authors of the Common Core English language arts standards. He is overseeing the renovation of both the PSAT and the SAT to fully implement the Common Core. The redesigned PSAT will be used in 2015; the new SAT will debut in 2016. Questions are being added to the ACT to reflect the Common Core’s emphasis on tracing ideas through multiple texts and increased focus on statistics. The ACT will also contain optional open-ended questions to assess students’ ability to explain and support their claims. The latest version of the Iowa Test of Basic Skills is based on the Common Core. The GED has been redesigned for the first time since 2002 to incorporate “practices and skills from the Common Core State Standards for Mathematical Practice.”



If a person wishes to attend a top-tier university such as Yale, there is a possibility of gaining admission without going through the SAT. Here's how they describe the requirements:

Home-schooled applicants complete the same application as other students and must fulfill the same testing requirements. Because home-schooled students may lack standard measures of academic performance, they must try to provide comparable information in different ways. Here are a few suggestions for home-schoolers as they approach the application process:

Testing

Standardized test scores hold relatively more weight for home-schooled applicants. If you are a home-schooler and you feel confident about your ability to do well on the exams, we advise you to demonstrate your abilities in various areas by taking more than the required two SAT Subject Tests.



Alternately, a student can provide letters of recommendation and evidence of maturity and ability. But as university curricula are modified to align with lower education guidelines, the subject will still need to be able to succeed with these new methods of teaching.

Princeton has a slightly different procedure:

SAT and ACT

All applicants, including home schooled students, are expected to take the SAT Reasoning Test or the ACT (with Writing, where offered), and two SAT Subject tests. While only two subject tests are required, some home schooled students choose to take more than two to further demonstrate their academic breadth in the absence of traditional grades.



Some private schools opt to adopt Common Core standards, like this one in New Jersey:

But some private school have applied Common Core and say it has been beneficial for both the faculty and students.

Calais School in Whippany, N.J. has been using Common Core standards since 2009 to receive state accreditation, according to assistant principal Steve Sokolewicz. The school is a private nonprofit institution for students with special needs. It has 80 students from kindergarten through 12th grade, and tuition rates are set by the state.

“There is a choice with private schools,” Sokolewicz says. “But if you are going to be state approved, you pretty much adhere to the guidelines set by the state.”



The website for Independent School Management explains how Common Core will affect independent schools:

According to a recent article in Education Week, Common Core State Standards, which are being adopted in public schools in 46 of the 50 US states, are starting to move into some independent school curricula. The standards cover K-12 math and English/language arts, in an attempt to provide all US students with the knowledge and skills they need for college and employment success.

More than 100 Roman Catholic dioceses—including those in Los Angeles and Philadelphia—are adopting the standards, as well as Lutheran schools in Illinois, Michigan, and Ohio.

Utah officials told Swasey no student may attend schools there without being tracked, even those in non-public schools. The personal data are currently being collected through the tests public schools are required to administer, but part of the agreement the states signed for stimulus money includes a requirement that schools collect data on students who are not tested.

“We are strongly encouraging and recommending that Lutheran schools go with this,” said Bruce N. Braun, the superintendent of schools for the Michigan district of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. “We think it's good for kids. And there is some room for creativity, room for you to be a professional in how you reach the standards."

Other independent schools are using the Common Core as a guideline or a starting point for their curricula.

“Our lower school math is grounded in the Common Core and I would say our language arts is influenced,” Andy Davies, Aspen Country Day School (CO) curriculum director, told Education Week. “As an independent school person, I can use it as a stake in the ground and massage it so that it meets our needs.”



Dr. Mary Byrnes is a semi-retired educator. She spent 25 years in higher education and homeschooled her daughter for part of her education.

“(Common Core) happened too fast for it to have been considered thoughtfully,” said Byrnes.

She believes the connections between Common Core constructors and publishing company CTB/McGrawHill and College Board executives will hinder the ability of private and homeschools to choose curriculum. College Board is a not-for-profit organization that oversees programs like Advanced Placement, the SAT and several more.

“What this does for homeschoolers is basically narrow their options for the selection of colleges, based on the kinds of tests those colleges are going to require,” said Byrnes. “If they require a test developed by College Board, the content of that test is going to be aligned to the Common Core Standard.”

Students must check with the college or university to know which type of entrance exam they need to take to be considered for that school.

“What this boils down to is (CTB/McGrawHill) is going to control education and they’ll have control of the content, so what goes on in our schools will be controlled by corporations,” said Byrnes. “That means it’s no longer a public school. We’re paying tax dollars to have (CTB/McGrawHill) control what goes on in education and that should concern everybody in the state. ... The bottom line is, the people who control the standards and control the assessments — assessments are the key — they control education.



As for how the SAT test will be modified to align with Common Core:

The revamping of the SAT was announced last week by David Coleman, a controversial figure widely described as the “architect” of Common Core, who in 2012 became president of the College Board, which controls the tests. Among the biggest changes are the removal of the essay requirement and an end to penalties for incorrect answers aimed at discouraging guessing. Also sparking alarm among experts concerned about the ongoing dumbing down of American education is the fact that the SAT will be drastically scaling back and simplifying the vocabulary and math requirements. Also sparking alarm among experts concerned about the ongoing dumbing down of American education is the fact that the SAT will be drastically scaling back and simplifying the vocabulary and math requirements.



Sex Education and Common Core

There is an entire curriculum for sex education, year by year. You can read this entire curriculum here: . The images that follow on the following pages show some of the most significant of these standards. You can see that these guidelines call for kids between kindergarten and second grade to be able to "Identify different kinds of family structures." By the end of the fifth grade, students should be able to "Define sexual orientation as the romantic attraction of an individual to someone of the same gender or a different gender." By the end of eighth grade, students should understand "emergency contraception" – in other words, the "morning after pill." They should also be able to "Explain the range of gender roles."

Please see the image of sex education standards starting on the next page.

Common Core opponent Joseph R. John said:

There is a heavy socio political content of sex throughout Common Core curriculum being taught in every grade and in every subject, the student is taught that there is a sameness of gender, there is no longer simply boys and girls according to Common Core. The sexual content of Common Core crosses into every curriculum taught, from teaching sexuality skills in sex education courses by specially skilled and trained sex education teachers. Sexual activities and content in included in every subject taught. Sex is taught in the English curriculum, is included in the language curriculum, sex is woven into the science curriculum, in the math curriculum, in the social studies curriculum, and of course in biology.

Since sex practices are included in every subject taught, parents will no longer be able to opt out of sex education being taught to their children in city schools, and by opting out assuming that only they would be able to teach their children sex education at home, and in accordance with their personal and religious beliefs. Children are taught holding hands, hugging, kissing, is the same as every other deviate sex acts—they are taught there is a sameness to “all” sex—there is no such thing as normal sex in Common Core, wide open sex of every weird type is taught to be acceptable in Common Core. Pornography is no longer looked down upon in the Common Core curriculum. Very young students can’t even comprehend those teachings and understand that if someone does something to their little bodies, that they were told about in the Common Core sex curriculum, that it is wrong and shouldn’t be done to them.

The Core Curriculum states the students must be taught cooperative and active sex, working together in lab sessions with each other. Students can’t opt out on their own, because sex crosses into all the Common Core courses and all the testing—if they opt out they would fail the testing. They are being taught by specially sex skilled teachers, and the students are tested on sexual skills and concepts being taught. Every imaginable inappropriate sexual skill is being taught to students in kindergarten thru grade 12. These inappropriate sexual skills are being driven into the Common Core curriculum and are being tested by the Department of Health Education and Welfare.



Dr. Duke Pesta, in his well known video explaining the problems with Common Core reports that schools that are being built now have clinics included that can dispense pharmaceuticals or birth control pills or take youth off-campus for an abortion. This provision accompanies the implementation of Obamacare.

Also in his video, Pesta pointed out a posted that a sixth grade child in the Midwest found in her classroom and took a picture of. Here is the photo she took:

When her father complained to the school system, here was the reply he received:

Further, Dr. Pesta described a book that appears in most middle school libraries and while not strictly speaking part of Common Core, is marked as "Common Core Compliant." The book shows young people masturbating and explaining how to do the act, illustrates a person putting on a condom and shows a variety of naked people in illustrations. As shown in his video, here is the image of the book:



One other way that Common Core manages to distribute inappropriate sexual material arrives in the form of a book on the recommended reading list for 11th graders. The book is The Bluest Eye. A very brief excerpt serves to show why this book is so inappropriate:

Pages 162-163: “A bolt of desire ran down his genitals…and softening the lips of his anus. . . . He wanted to f*** her—tenderly. But the tenderness would not hold. The tightness of her vagina was more than he could bear. His soul seemed to slip down his guts and fly out into her, and the gigantic thrust he made into her then provoked the only sound she made. Removing himself from her was so painful to him he cut it short and snatched his genitals out of the dry harbor of her vagina. She appeared to have fainted.”



The book actually gets worse after that, delving into sexual abuse of small girls by a male adult.

2

3 Video Transcript from Walking the Labyrinth of the

Corporate Owned Common Core

by Morna McDermott

4 This video transcript from McDermott provides many of the same connections that have been covered in my repors. McDermott's biography reads: Morna McDermott is an author and educator living in Baltimore with her husband and two children. She has been in education and teacher-education for over twenty years, and engages in creative writing as both a form of research and as a creative outlet. Her areas of scholarly and creative interest include art, social justice, democracy, fighting for public education. Her report is so complete that I thought it had value to include in this reporting.

5 The link to the video appears just below. McDermott is creating a chart in this video. The image of that chart appears below the transcript.

------------------

6 A Labyrinth of Corporate Interests in Common Core

Posted: July 25, 2013

This is a companion document connected to the video I made entitled Walking the Labyrinth of the Corporate Owned Common Core found at

The following is the transcript of the narrative from that video. (Note: I’ve added additional items I forgot to mention in the video in italics, and have inserted NOTES with extended information on certain items, and provided a list of references at the end).

Transcript begins:

Hi. I’m Morna McDermott. It’s July 23rd 2013 and this is my overview of corporate involvement in the Common Core. Let’s start with U.S. Department of Education which funded, through grants and other funding, the Common Core via Race to the Top and handed it over to three major organizations: the National Governors Association, the CCSSO, otherwise known as the Chief Counsel State School Officers, and Achieve … who have partnered to disseminate, organize, manage or otherwise outsource the Common Core and the assessments that go with it.

INSERTED NOTE: I failed to mention that Achieve is funded in large part by ALEC-associated corporations including Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Boeing, GE Foundation, Lumina, Nationwide, and State Farm.

(Transcript continued): So let’s start over here. The Director of Race to the Top is Joanne Weiss who worked with the Broad Foundation which also has as one of its acting members Chester Finn with the Fordham Institute. Broad Foundation is also a member of ALEC which sponsored the bill called the Parent Trigger Act. I’ll come back to that.

INSERTED NOTE: A little more background on the Eli Broad Foundation. This foundation advertises its commitment to education in the following way (according to their website): “Broad Superintendents Academy graduates are raising student achievement faster than their peers after three years in their positions. And Broad Residents are freeing up millions of dollars for the classroom by introducing central office efficiencies … ”

Sounds nice. But there’s more… According to one author: “The network involves outspoken individuals with elitist credentials, long time neo-liberals, right-wing think tank pundits and their conservative foundation sponsors, other foundations such as Wallace and the Broad Foundations, and quasi-government agencies … Broad money is sloshed behind the scenes to elect or select candidates who buy the Broad corporate agenda in education (see Emery and Ohanian, 2004, pp.89-94). Broad’s enemies are teacher unions, school boards, and schools of education. What all three have in common is that they eschew corporate, top-down control required in the Broad business model.”

(Transcript continued): The National Governors Association partners with Achieve for the Common Core. The National Governors Association also partners with the College Board. The CCSSO partners with Pearson for the Common Core (to create) the materials. The CCSSO also partners with ACT which is funded by State Farm which is a member of ALEC. Pearson, among other things, there is not enough time to cover everything in Pearson, so this is a broad sketch…acquired Connections Academy which is a member of ALEC. Connections Academy (via Mickey Revenaugh, Senior Vice President of State Relations for Connections Academy as of 2011) was actually the co-chair of the subcommittee for education in ALEC. Pearson also acquired America’s Choice which sponsored a program called the NCEE which also partners with the CCSSO.

INSERTED NOTE: America’s Choice began as a program of the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE), a not-for-profit organization headquartered in Washington, D.C. In the autumn of 2004, America’s Choice was reorganized as a for-profit subsidiary of NCEE.

Since its founding in 1988, NCEE has been a leader of the educational standards movement in the U.S., and the America’s Choice program has become a premier provider of comprehensive school and instructional design services, technical assistance and teacher professional development.

According to Jay Greene: “NCEE’s scheme was originally financed by a $1,500,000 pilot grant from the Gates Foundation. It will now benefit from a sweetheart deal of $30,000,000–all taxpayers’ money. Having Gates pay for both NCEE’s start-up and the development of Common Core standards certainly helped America’s Choice to put its key people on Common Core’s ELA and mathematics standards development and draft-writing committees to ensure that they came up with the readiness standards Gates had paid for and wanted NCEE to use. NCEE has a completely free hand to ‘align’ its ‘Board’ exams exactly how it pleases with Common Core’s ‘college-readiness’ level and to set passing scores exactly where it wants, since the passing score must be consistent across piloting states.”

Other funders of NCEE who are also members of ALEC include Eastman Kodak Company, Lumina Foundation, and Ford Motor Company Fund, Boeing, Xerox, and Broad Foundation.

(Transcript cont.): The NCEE is funded by Walton- come over here-The Walton Foundation which is a member of ALEC and is basically associated with Walmart, directly funds the Common Core State Standards. And again, too many too many connections to mention- this is just brought sketch. I’m gonna come back up over here to the CCSSO (whose director is Tom Luna- correction, current Director is Chris Minnich former employee of Pearson) to look at their connections with McKinsey and Co. which is a global consulting firm. Their big thing is called “Big Data”… they believe that the data is the answer to all things right now, (and) as you can see they’ve got their fingerprints all over everything in the Common Core. For one thing, David Coleman was one of the architects of the Common Core … he created the Student Achievement Partners which helped develop a standards, (and he) was a former consultant for McKinsey. Lou Gerstner, who is the co-founder of Achieve, was the former director at McKinsey & Co. and Sir Michael Barber was a former consultant McKinsey, is now one of the CEO’s at Pearson. Pearson partners with the PARCC Consortium for the assessments. And I said they already partner with Achieve and ACT. The PARCC, following the screen line (in red) all the way over here, has their data collection (in) a partnership with inBloom. Now inBloom is a part Wireless Generation and is contracting with several states to collect the data for all their testing. The two key players in inBloom are Joel Klein (and) Rupert Murdoch. And in addition, members of the Board of inBloom include Margaret Spellings, Gene Wilhoit (former Executive Director) of the CCSSO, and also on the board is Bob Wise. Bob (Wise) was the chair for the Alliance for Excellent Education which is the brainchild Jeb Bush. It’s funded by State Farm. The Alliance for Excellent Education partners with, or supports, the Common Core. I’m gonna… follow me down here…. to the Council for Foreign Relations which supports a national curriculum and has been a big promoter at the Common Core Standards and has had direct influence on it. They created a paper in partnership with the U.S. Department of Defense and with America’s Promise Alliance to craft paper call the Education Reform and National Security Report and its authors supported the Common Core State Standards initiative. So, on the Council for Foreign Relations you have Lou Gertsner, who you know is the co-founder of Achieve, as I already mentioned, and who is a former director at McKinsey & Co. Also on the Board of Directors (of America’s Promise Alliance) is general Colin Powell – one of the things that this paper mentioned was the importance of the U.S. Department of Defense in overseeing and managing the Common Core. Other signers of this paper include Condoleeza Rice – and one of the cosponsors of this paper was America’s Promise Alliance which supports the Common Core .

INSERT: Visible but not mentioned is endorsement on this paper by a representative of the American Enterprise Institute, Rick Hess, who ironically vocalizes public skepticism of the Common Core. See the actual document for a full list of signatories.

(Transcript continued): The chair of America’s Promise Alliance is Alma Powell. The co-chair is Greg Petersmeyer, who is a McKinsey and Co. consultant and (he) helped develop something called Fuse Corporation which, among other things, supported Teach for America. So Fuse Corp is one of the partners of America Promise Alliance which is funded by Pearson Foundation, the Walmart Foundation which isin ALEC, the Gates Foundation, Lumina which is in ALEC, Boeing which is in ALEC, and Lockheed Martin which is the world’s largest weapons manufacturer and is a member of ALEC, (and) The Ford Foundation. Bill Gates…um this is a board sketch because there are way too many things to mention about Bill Gates, but among other things… on of the Board of Directors for Wireless Generation is an employee at the Gates Foundation.

INSERT: Clarification of an error. The former Gates employee works for inBloom, not Wireless. Her name is Sharren Bates and she is the Chief Product Officer. . Also, on the Board of Director sits Deputy Director of the Next Generation Models Team for Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Stacey Childress.

(Transcript continued): The Gates Foundation directly funded the inBloom network. Gates also funds the College Board, which is now run by David Coleman–remember from Student Achievement Partners that made the standards for Common Core, and (who) was a former consultant at McKinsey & Co–um where’d they go… Gates Foundation also directly funds the Common Core State Standards. The National Governors Association partners with the College Board and also partners with the Achieve. The CCSSO also partners with McKinsey & Co. to manage the PARCC after 2014. This initiative is also partnered by Lumina which is a member ALEC …So after 2014, McKinsey and Co. may be managing our children data. Specifically, the state of Florida has potentially considered a contract with McKinsey and Co. to manage the PARCC as of 2015. Again, this is a broad sketch-and there’s always more than meets the eye. But if every line was on here that needed to be on here, it would be even more unreadable than it already is. I forgot to mention U.S. Department of Education… the key advisers for the 2009 U.S. Department of Education “Blueprint” included largely members at McKinsey and Co. and the Broad Foundation. So it’s curious how much ALEC contends that it opposes the Common Core yet so many organizations that are members of ALEC have funded its inception and continue to promote its perpetuation from state to state.



McDermott's chart follows on the next page.

McDermott's References:

inBloom:





Lumina and CCSSO:

State Farm and ALEC:

Lockheed Martin:

Chester Finn:

ACT and Pearson:

David Coleman: (educator)



Boeing:

America’s Promise Alliance:





Council on Foreign Relations:





McKinsey and Co:









Lou Gerstner:







Alliance for Excellent Education:

Grad Nation:

Connections Academy:

Pearson:





American Legislative Exchange Commission (ALEC):





Tom Luna:

Schools Report: Failing to Prepare Students Hurts National Security, Prosperity:

Joel Klein:

NCEE (Natl Center for Education and the Economy):

Other General References:



(Ten Most Wanted Enemies of American Public Education’s School Leadership)









From the National Center for Education Statistics



Additional Samples of Lessons and Tests from Common Core

No other instructions were provided with this workbook.

And for a final comment on Common Core math, this math assignment from a fifth grade student:

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