It was President George W. Bush who began the federal intervention of education when he implemented the legislation known as the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2002. The aim of NCLB was to standardize testing in all 50 states. It required 100% student competency targets. By threatening funding to the 50 states, the NCLB began the intervention of the federal government in education in a major way.
President Barack Obama continued and increased even more the intervention of federal government in education in the 50 states. After all, the president had to include educational institutions in his plan to fundamentally transform our nation. Obama implemented the Race-to-the-Top (RTTT) in 2009. This was a multi-billion dollar program that put pressure or bribed or blackmailed the states to adopt policies that included test-based teacher evaluation and a nationwide standards and curriculum. The new national curriculum and standards is called the Common Core State Standards (CCSS).
In Florida, Governor Charlie Crist, without any discussion, agreed to the CCSS, even before the standards were written. In order to develop the CCSS and create incentives or bribes for the states to adopt it, $4.35 billion dollars from the Stimulus package were used for this purpose. No Child Left Behind waivers were granted to states for agreeing to adopt the CCSS. Multimillion grants were awarded by the Obama administration to states for the implementation of the CCSS. Upon the suggestion of former Governor Jeb Bush, Governor Rick Scott hired Tony Bennett as Florida´s Commissioner of Education. Tony Bennett had lost his job as Indiana´s Education Superintendent due to his strong support of Common Core. Grass roots activists and conservative organizations opposed the Common Core and denounced Bennett and he lost his reelection. Tony Bennett was forced to resign his job in Florida due to an scandal regarding his intervention in the change of the letter grade received by a charter school in Indiana owned by a Republican major donor.
Former Governor Jeb Bush, who is a strong supporter of the CCSS, came to his defense after Bennett resigned. Jeb Bush has come under strong attack by Tea party and conservative organizations for his support of CCSS, as a result, he may have lost his chance of being nominated by the Republican Party as a candidate for president in 2016.
The CCSS was developed by an organization called Achieve and by the National Governors Association, both of which were funded by the liberal Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The standards have been imposed on the nation without any field testing and with minimal or no input from those involved in implementing the standards. No pilot testing of any kind, as is customary when adopting a new program, was done.
All states, except for five, adopted the CCSS. These brave states that rejected the illegal and unconstitutional federal takeover of education were the following: Texas, Virginia, Nebraska, Minnesota, and Alaska. The rest of the states that adopted the CCSS must now force all schools to adhere strictly to this federal-imposed program word for word. School districts have permission to add a very small amount of content, up to 15%, which, of course, will not be tested. If parents, teachers, school administrators, school superintendents, or school board members do not like what is being taught in the schools, they do not have the power to change any part of the federally mandated curriculum and standards. The CCSS will be expensive to implement as it requires massive upgrades in computer equipment and upgrade to current bandwidth.
The reality is that the Obama administration, by implementing the Common Core State Standards across the nation, has allowed the federal government to take over the educational system of the 45 states that adopted them under the auspices of the new standardized testing. Any state that refuses to implement the CCSS will be denied vitally-needed federal funds. Practically all of the states are short of educational funds and only a very few of states can afford to be without federal funding.
The two national teacher unions, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA), sold their teachers down the river when they supported CCSS. Teachers will now be judged during the 2014-2015 school year on the basis of the performance of their students. The salary and tenure of teachers across the nation will be also impacted. Many teachers have complained that poor students and those who come from the inner city traditionally do poorly on standardized testing. In general, students who come from dysfunctional families in the inner city or any other neighborhood that experiences a great deal of violence and where education is not emphasized in the homes do not achieve in school as well as those students who come from middle and upper middle higher socio-economic families.
The new federal standards imposed on the nation by the Obama administration will impact the curriculum of the nation’s schools since these standards will dictate the test and testing drives the curriculum. It will not only impact all the public schools across the nation, but also religious and private schools as well as students who are being home schooled by their parents since the entrance exams for colleges and universities will be based on this new set of standards.
Critics of the Common Core State Standards believe that they are not rigorous enough for college education
There are many critics of the CCSS who believe that the new national standards are not rigorous enough to make our students ready for colleges and universities. Several states have now standards far superior to those of the CCSS and other states have standards at least as good. The only mathematician working on the mathematics standards said that the Common Core (CC) mathematics standards will place our students about two years behind their counterparts in high-performing countries in mathematics. One drafter of the CC math standards stated that they were designed to prepare students for a two-year community college and not for a four-year university.
Other critics of the CC English standards believe that the new standards for English weaken the basis of literary and cultural knowledge needed for authentic college coursework. Critics also believe that the CCSS changes the American model of education to look more like a European model, which tracks students into a vocational or academic track at an early age. The state of Florida will begin issuing in the future two types of diplomas at the senior high school level, one for academic students planning to go to college and another one for those going into the workforce.
Dangers of data mining students through Common Core
The term “data mining” began to be used for the first time when the American people discovered that they were being illegaly spied by the National Security Agency (NSA).The NSA uses data mining to collect and store in gigantic computers over two billion phone calls a day, monitors our text messages and emails, watches our pictures and videos, and tracks our movements as we walk on sidewalks and enter buildings and drive our cars. Another program called PRISM monitors nine Internet companies, including Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo. Additionally, our government keeps track of our credit card purchases and other financial transactions. Big Brother is here in our nation. The Obama´s Justice Department under the corrupt Attorney General Eric Holder spied on 100 journalists of the Associated Press. Both the president and his attorney general have violated our Constitution on multiple occasions. Neither have any respect for the rule of law.
Now the Obama administration wants to collect an enormous amount of information on students in public schools throughout the nation using data mining. The CCSS incorporates a plan to closely monitor the students in the classrooms of our nation. The intrusive data tracking will be part of the State Longitudinal Database System which would track over 400 points in each student. Four sensors will be used while students are engaged in instruction: facial expression camara, posture analysis seat, pressure mouse, and wireless skin conductance sensor. The data mining will be collected and stores by inBloom, Inc., a private organization funded largely by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Additionally, Wireless Generation, a division of Rupert Murdoch´s conservative News Corp., will build the database infrastructure. Rupert Murdoch was involved in a great scandal in the United Kingdom for illegally spying on celebrities and royalty and violating their privacy and also for paying money to the police to provide information for his newspapers in that country. News Corp. is the owner of Fox News Television Channel.
The corporation inBloom invited nine states to participate in a pilot program. They agreed to collect and share confidential student and teacher data with this corporation. However, by the spring of 2013, four of the nine states decided to pull out of the pilot program due to privacy concerns. These states were Louisiana, Georgia, Delaware, and Kentucky. Three other states, Colorado, Massachusetts, and North Carolina are now reconsidering their participation in the pilot program with inBloom. That only leaves the liberal democratic states of New York and Illinois participating in this illegal and unconstitutional collection of information.
The corporation has stated that it cannot guarantee the security of the information stored since information could be intercepted when is being transmitted from the states to inBloom. The corporation, nevertheless, has said that it would charge participating states and districts five dollars per student per year for its services. It is really outrageous and unprecedented that all of these plans are happening without parental knowledge or consent. Clearly, it is a violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution as well as federal laws which guarantee privacy to all citizens.
The United States Department of Education (DOE) explained in a report that there would be “four parallel streams of affective sensors” employed to effectively measure each student. The facial expression camara, for example, “is a device that can be used to detect emotion…The camara captures facial expressions, and software on the laptop extracts geometric properties on faces.” Other devices, such as the posture analysis seat, pressure mouse, and wireless skin conductance sensor, which looks like a wide black bracelet strapped to a child’s wrist, are all designed to collect “physiological response data from a biofeedback apparatus that measures blood volume, pulse, and galvanic skin response to examine student frustration.” DOE further explained that all this data mining of students will provide learners and educators feedback about their behaviors, emotions, physiological responses, and cognitive processes that has never been available before.
This writer has a grandson enrolled in the Miami-Dade County public schools. Neither his daughter or her husband, nor this writer, would ever permit anyone to place on him any type of affecting sensors. This writer´s family will not tolerate any invasion or violation of privacy upon the child of our family.
The Obama administration´s DOE wants to collect from each student attending a public school in the nation personally identifiable information that will include the following data: name of parents, address, Social Security number, date of birth, place of birth, mother´s maiden name, etc. Additionally, DOE will extract the following information from each student:
1. Political affiliations or beliefs of the student or parent.
2. Mental and psychological problems of the student or the student´s family.
3. Sex behavior or attitudes.
4. Illegal, anti-social, self-incriminating, and demeaning behavior.
5. Critical appraisals of other individuals with whom respondents have close family relationships.
6. Legally recognized, privileged or analogous relationships, such as those of lawyers, physicians, and ministers.
7. Religious practices, affiliations, or beliefs of the student or the student´s parents.
8. Income (other than that required by law to determine eligibility for participation in a program or for receiving financial assistance under such a program).
It is unclear whether the students will be required to answer the above questions while being analyzed by the four kinds of sensors. All students will be subjected to questioning. Critics of the unprecedented data mining of public school students do not believe DOE assurances that data mining information will require written parental consent. The critics feel that there are loopholes that could circumvent parental authority.
Congressman Blain Luekemeyer, Republican from Missouri, recently wrote a letter to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. In a part of this letter he wrote the following: “We formally request a detailed description of each change to the student privacy policy that has been made under your leadership, including the need and intended purpose for such changes.” The congressman was alluding to the data mining that will be used to track students by obtaining personally identifiable information under the State Longitudinal Database System. The congressman and others are concerned that confidential student information would be given away or sold to private companies or organizations. Mary Black, curriculum director for Freedom Project Education, stated that data mining leads to total control and total tracking of students. She stated that “it completely strips the child of his or her own privacy.”
Obama’s radical friends and associates are pushing Common Core
One of Barack Obama´s best friend, retired professor of education from University of Chicago Dr. Bill Ayers, is very involved in pushing his national curriculum called Common Core. Ayers and his wife Bernadine Dorn were members of the terrorist communist organization Weather Underground, which declared war on the United States during the Vietnam War. This reprehensible couple planted approximately 30 bombs across the United States. Both of them and other terrorists were building a bomb in New York City to detonate at the U.S. Army base at Fort Dix, New Jersey, where soldiers were being prepared to leave for Vietnam. While the terrorists were building the bomb, it exploded and killed several of them. Under our laws, when a felony is being planned and someone dies, it is an automatic charge of first-degree murder for all those involved in planning a crime.
Ayers and Dorn were fugitives for many years. When they finally were arrested and taken to trial, they were found not guilty due a technicality. This technicality was that their conversations were illegally tapped by the federal government. Ayers´s father was a multi-millionaire from Chicago who owned the largest utility in that town.
Bill Ayers was hired by the University of Chicago as a professor of education to the great shame of that higher education institution. Ayers had a long career at the University of Chicago poisoning the mind of many students who became teachers. Barack Obama began his political career in the living room of the home Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorn. Later, Bill Ayers wrote the autobiography of Barack Obama called Dreams from my Father. Bernadine Dorn worked in the same legal firm in Chicago with Michelle Obama. The two couples live in the same neighborhood.
Barack Obama and Ayers worked closely during many years in Chicago. Both were member of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge that contributed more than $100 million to Marxist organizations such as ACORN and the very radical Gamaliel. Both of these organizations promoted radical education in the Chicago public schools. Barack Obama also worked with Bill Ayers in the Woods Fund where they channeled funds to ACORN and the radical Midwest Academy.
It is believed that Bill Ayers has visited the Obama´s White House on several occasions, as many other radicals have done, including Muslim Brotherhood jihadists, over the last four and a half years. Bill Ayers was one of three keynote speakers at a conference sponsored by the Renaissance Group dealing with the problems of poverty, diversity, and multiculturalism and the inability of white teachers to deal with these issues. The other two speakers were Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Under Secretary of Education Martha Kanter.
Bill Ayers spent years at the University of Chicago discussing these issues with the purpose to radicalizing future teachers and encouraging them to create a revolution and overthrow the capitalist system. Bill Ayers also participated in a conference sponsored by Achieve,Inc., another organization that had received funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Why was this communist revolutionary and terrorist speaking at these conferences, one of which that was attended by the secretary and under secretary of education? There is no doubt that Bill Ayers is working also on CCSS. After all, Arne Duncan was the former superintendent of schools of the Chicago Public Schools and he was appointed by President Obama to fundamentally transform the public schools of this nation.
Another radical leftist, Linda Darling-Hammond, who served as education director of Obama’s transition team in 2008, is working closely with Bill Ayers to implement a radical curriculum for our nation, one of which would be highly critical of our nation and the West. She received a $176 million grant of the federal Race-to-the-Top funds to develop Common Core testing. In addition to these two radicals, many progressive- socialist organizations are also involved, including those organizations supported by George Soros.
Legal and constitutional implications of the Common Core State Standard
According to the Tenth Amendment to our Constitution, “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, or prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.” Since education does not appear anywhere in our Constitution, it means that education was not given to the federal government and that it was reserved for the states. This has been the way it has always been interpreted since the beginning of our constitutional Republic. Education was never an enumerated power of the federal government. This writer, and many others citizens and organizations, believes that the intervention of the federal government by forcing a national curriculum and standards violates the Tenth amendment to our Constitution. Data mining of students, in this writer’s opinion, also violates the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution that protects privacy.
Additionally, there are many federal laws that state that the federal Department of Education shall not be involved in developing, supervising, or controlling instructional materials or curriculum of any school education institution. There is a federal law that states that the privacy of the records of the students must be protected. One such law is the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). This federal law was approved by Congress and signed by President Gerald Ford on August 21, 1974. FERPA gives students access to their educational records and the opportunity to have the records amended and some control over the disclosure of information from the records.
Examples of situations that involve FERPA include the prohibition of school employees to divulge information to anyone other than the student or his/her parents regarding the student´s grades or behavior. Generally, educational institutions must have written permission from the parent or eligible student in order to release any information from a student´s educational records. This privacy policy also applies to how a state agency transmits testing data to federal agencies. This law is also known as the Buckley Amendment, in honor of one of its proponents, Senator James L. Buckley of New York.
It seems to this writer that data mining and the potential for disclosing the information of students to private corporations and public agencies violates the protection afforded to students by FERPA. This writer is extremely concerned that the data mining contemplated by the CCSS of all public schools students in the nation could be given and collected by the National Security Agency.
The unprecedented data mining contemplated by the Common Core Curriculum Standards appears to this writer as if now living in a Big Brother totalitarian society. In communist Cuba, all students have a cumulative folder that note their participation in communist youth organizations and the political and religious ideas of their parents. Students are penalized if they do not participate in communist youth organizations and if their parents do not support the communist revolution or if they attend religious services. The students or their parents, who lacked revolutionary ideas, are denied a college education. The data mining of public school students contemplated by the Obama administration reminds this writer, who fought at the Bay of Pigs and served in prison in Cuba, as he were living again in Cuba.
The Obama administration has already violated the privacy of adults in our society with the massive collection of information by the National Security Agency. Now it appears that the administration wants to include the personal information of children and youngsters and their parents as well. This should not be tolerated since we do not live in Venezuela, North Korea, China, Vietnam, Iran, or Cuba.
The growing opposition to the Common Core Curriculum Standards
One of the strongest critics of CCSS has been Glenn Beck, who has denounced it on radio and on his television channel The Blaze. Glenn Beck has criticized the Obama administration for using our tax money to indoctrinate our children to a Marxist mindset. Michelle Malkin, the conservative radio and television journalist, wrote four articles severely criticizing the new national curriculum and standards. She explained that Common Core is rotten to the core. Malkin criticized the new standards in mathematics and English for having significantly lower expectations in those two important subjects and calling them a mandate for mediocrity.
Michelle Malkin was appalled by the federal government´s spying and gathering intimate data on children and families in schools. She stated the following: “Say goodbye to your children’s privacy. Say hello to an unprecedented nationwide student tracking system, whose data will apparently be sold by government officials to the highest bidders.”
Senator Marco Rubio was interviewed by a reporter Javier Manjarres of the Internet publication The Shark Tank in Orlando, Florida. The reporter asked Senator Rubio what was his position in regards to Common Core. Senator Rubio stated that he is a supporter of curriculum reform but he thinks the curriculum reform should be done at the state level and not at the federal level. The senator stated the following: “I am very concerned, and quite frankly opposed to any effort to try to create some sort of national curriculum standards and then tried to leverage the power of the federal government´s funding to force states to adopt a certain curriculum standards. State and local levels are the best places to common with curriculum reform, and it is something the federal government should not be deeply involved.”
Three organizations, Bear Witness, Florida Parents Against Common Core, and Floridians Against Common Core Education, have been very active in Florida providing written information and holding meetings regarding the dangers of this national curriculum and standards that are being imposed. These three organizations have great websites with lots of information regarding CCSS. These organization and others are petitioning Florida´s governor and the state legislature to stop data collection on students through Common Core. Petitions are being collected throughout the state complaining that data mining of children is a serious breach of privacy and the law.
All of these groups are explaining to the governor and members of the Florida legislature that the state will face lawsuits when parents find out that their child’s data will be collected without their permission. Furthermore, they are explaining that other states are already being sued for Common Core with respect to data and privacy invasions by such groups as the ACLU and that Florida is similarly at risk of expensive legal action. In spite of the fact that the Republican National Committee has unanimously adopted an anti-Common Core resolution, the majority Republican Florida legislature has moved in an opposite direction and is implementing Common Core.
A group of concerned parents, educators, and activists from various counties in Florida, including Broward and Miami-Dade County, have spoken at school board meetings against Common Core and requested school districts to pass resolutions opposing its implementation in Florida. One thing is certain, when parents and citizens in the nation find out the unprecedented and misguided plan for using high tech data mining of their children and of parents, they will rise in protest over this gross invasion of privacy.
Conclusion
Many Americans are by now well aware that we have a president who has demonstrated since he was elected into office a disregard for the rule of law and the Constitution. He is a president who legislates in violation of the Constitution through executive orders and through regulations issued by his government departments and agencies that have the same effect of laws. He is a president who picks and chooses which laws he wants to enforce. He is a president who, through speeches and actions, divides the nation instead of bringing us together. He is a president who stated in 2008 that he wants to radically transform our nation and who is fulfilling his diabolical promise.
The numerous and unprecedented dramatic scandals in the Obama administration clearly shows that the president cannot be trusted. Particularly, a president who has demonstrated to have totalitarian tendencies and who feels he is omnipotent. He is a president who constantly demonizes members of Congress and all others who oppose his misguided policies. He is a president who used the IRS to persecute conservative and religious organizations as well as individuals who donated large amount of funds to PACS which opposed him during the 2012 presidential campaign. He is a president whose Department of Justice spies on journalists and refuses to answer questions from Congress. He is a president who abandoned our ambassador and others when he could have saved them at Benghazi. He is a president who is vindictive and who keeps an enemy list in the White House. Barack Obama is a rogue president who may be indicted for his involvement in one of the scandals of his administration, such as Benghazi and the International Revenue Service.
Who can possibly trust the Obama administration with the data mining aspect of the Common Core which can be abused and misused in the future? It seems to this writer that the data mining contemplated is quite dangerous and unconstitutional. It seems to this writer that we may be living in the Big Brother society described by George Orwell’s novel 1984. Many Hispanics who fled Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela and who lived under communism, as well as many other freedom-loving Americans, strongly believe that we definitely need to keep Big Brother out of the public school system and out of our society.
Americans must rise throughout the nation and oppose this illegal and unconstitutional national curriculum being imposed on most of the states. Our voices must be heard loud and clear when we say:
No to Common Core because it is unconstitutional.
No to Common Core because is a socialist plan.
No to Common Core because we do not live in Cuba or China.
No to Common Core because it will spy on students and their parents.
No to Common Core because it is rotten to the core
