There is an increasingly growing revolt against the federally-imposed and unconstitutional Obama’s federal curriculum Common Core across the nation. This revolt has increased since the College Board adopted a new Framework for the Advanced Placement U.S. History course (APUSH) which casts U.S. history in such as negative way that it would please communist Howard Zinn, author of A People´s History of the United States and Marxists such as Bill Ayers and other radical friends of President Obama. Phyllis Schlafly wrote an article entitled “Common Core’s Growing Unpopularity” which was published in Human Events on August 12. 2014.
Schlafly explained that there are an increasing amount of critics from Glenn Beck to The Wall Street Journal, as well as academics and activist parents and teachers. Mathematics Professor Marina Ratner from the University of California at Berkeley realized the stupidity of Common Core when she looked at the homework of her grandson in the sixth grade.
Schlafly stated that Professor Ratner indicated the following: “Fractions are taught by having the kids draw pictures of everything, such as 6 divided by 8, and 4 divided by 2/7, and also by creating fictional stories for such things as 2/3 divided by 3/4. A student who gives the correct answer right away and doesn’t draw a picture or make up a story loses points.” Professor Ratner concluded that Common Core is making simple math concepts “artificially intricate and complex with the pretense of being deeper, while the actual content taught was primitive.” Professor Ratner said the following: “The bottom line is that Common Core is inferior to the current good California standards, and the $15.8 billion spent nationally to develop and adopt Common Core was a gigantic waste.” Mathematics scholars are convinced that Common Core standards are not preparing students for colleges and universities.
The Common Core Advanced Placement U.S. History Framework have just become available. Stanley Kurtz believes that the new Advanced Placement U.S. History (APUSH), as well the SAT college entrance exams, leave out “traditional emphasis on America’s founders and the principles of constitutional government” in favor of a leftist “emphasis on race, gender, class, ethnicity.”
John Aman wrote an article entitled “U.S. History Takes Drastic Left Turn This Fall” which was published by Bear Witness Central on August 5, 2014. He explained that APUSH High school teachers across the nation will have to teach their bright students a dark side of U.S. history during the fall of 2014, thanks the president of College Board and Common Core architect David Coleman. The College Board is putting out a revised curriculum Framework for Advanced Placement U.S. History, offering the 450,000 students who take APUSH classes a “hero-free account of America’s deeply negative past.”
Aman explained that Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, calls the new APUSH framework “a briefing document on progressive and leftist views of the American past,” one which “weaves together a vaguely Marxist or at least materialist reading of the key events with the whole litany of identity group grievances.”
Founding Fathers omitted and the Europeans were evil people
Aman pointed out that the APUSH course “deletes the Pilgrims, John Winthrop, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Alexis de Tocqueville, Abraham Lincoln and other long-celebrated figures central to America’s founding and growth.” The students will be taught that Europeans disrupted ecologically balanced native American society, bringing “widespread deadly epidemics,” a “caste system,” resource exploitation and slavery. The Europeans’ “belief in white superiority” was used, the Framework declares, “to justify their subjugation of Africans and American Indians.” Instead of the British establishing a “city upon a hill,” as generations of students have learned, they are portrayed as bigots beholden to a “rigid racial hierarchy,” The Framework gives the father of the country, George Washington, a quick, passing nod, and the founding document, the Declaration of Independence, merits two brief mentions.
Aman wrote that the new Framework does not discuss the enormous sacrifice of the American soldiers, marines, and members of the Navy and the Air Force in defeating Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan which rescued much of the world from oppressive tyranny. Instead, the new College Board APUSH curriculum announces that “the internment of Japanese Americans, challenges to civil liberties, debates over race and segregation, and the decision to drop the atomic bomb raised questions about American values.”
Aman explained that Larry Krieger, who has taught U.S. history for 35 years and written numerous widely popular AP and SAT exam prep books, said he reacted with shock and dismay when he read the framework earlier this year. He said “It’s relentless left-wing indoctrination, antithetical to everything that I believe about teaching and our country’s history.”
The framework is one of 34 Advanced Placement courses that are being revised under the leadership of College Board president and CEO David Coleman, who arrived at the organization in 2012. Aman pointed out that Krieger said the following: “When they hired David Coleman, the chief architect of Common Core, they effectively politicized the College Board. The first thing he did was to yoke the SAT to Common Core, and now the College Board is going to apply Common Core principles to AP courses.”
The College Board is an association of more than 6,000 educational institutions. It earned $759 million in fiscal year 2012 and reported a surplus of $45 million. Funding sources include the federal government, the Gates Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Critics of the new APUSH course believe that no elected board in the nation would have developed the atrocious Framework done by the College Board. The ones who wrote the Framework which portrays American history in such a negative light are unelected people. They have taken the power away from the state board and state legislature in all 50 states.
Aman said that concerned Texans spoke out against the new APUSH course at a July 18, 2014, meeting of the Texas School Board. Mary Bowen, a Texas teacher with 30 years of instructional experience told the board, “If parents up and down the neighborhoods knew that this is what would be taught to their children they would be rising up in droves against it.”
Schlafly pointed out that according to Kurtz, “James Madison, Thomas Jefferson and the other founders are largely left out of the new test unless they are “presented as examples of conflict and identity by class, gender, race, ethnicity, etc.” Parents who help their children’s homework and look at the Common Core textbooks that they are using have been extremely upset for many months.
Indiana was the first state to show the political power of the anti-Common Core movement. The activist parents defeated a state superintendent of education (which was hired and later fired in Florida) and several legislators on this issue. Maine withdrew from Common Core citing violations to the Fourth and Tenth Amendments to the Constitution as well as the Constitution of the state of Maine.
Oklahoma, Missouri, and South Carolina voted to repealed Common Core, North Carolina’s governor signed a more modest bill authorizing the state school board to tweak the standards. Common Core was developed by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers and initially adopted by 45 states and the District of Columbia.
Schlafly wrote that Louisiana was one of the original 45 states that signed for Common Core before the standards were even written. But one day Governor Bobby Jindal read his son’s Common Core math homework and was shocked. He then issued an executive order to block its implementation in Louisiana. Two more governors have turned against Common Core. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker announced that he wants the state legislature to repeal the Common Core standards when it meets in January 2015, Governor Gary Herbert of Utah asked his attorney general to conduct a review of Obama’s Common Core Curriculum Standards.
There were five states that refused to adopt Obama’s Common Core, in spite of being bribed with millions from the federal government from the very beginning. These brave states were Texas, Virginia, Alaska, Nebraska, and Minnesota.
Common Core financial supporters Bill & Melinda Gates are concerned and alarmed about the growing opposition to Common Core, are asking states to have a two-year moratorium before making any high-stakes decisions based on tests aligned to the Common Core Curriculum Standards. However, they are both wrong and the remaining states that are still following the Obama’s illegal and unconstitutional national curriculum need to repeal it.
President Barack Obama’s radical and Marxist friends and associates are pushing Common Core
Besides David Coleman, the president of the College Board and the architect of Common Core, who else are involved in this unconstitutional and socialist project? None other than one of Barack Obama´s best friend and collaborator, the unrepented terrorist and communist Dr. Bill Ayers, a retired professor of education from University of Chicago.
Ayers and his wife Bernadine Dorn were members of the terrorist communist organization Weather Underground, which declared war on the United States during the time of 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 city, and he hired very expensive lawyers to defend his son and daughter-in-law.
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 and are great friends. Why? They share the same ideology and belong to the Hate the USA crowd!
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 five 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 of radicalizing future teachers and encouraging them to create a revolution and overthrow the capitalist system of the United States. 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 unrepented terrorist speaking at these conferences, one of which that was attended by the secretary and under secretary of education? Bill Ayers is a strong supporter of Common Core. Arne Duncan was the former superintendent of schools of the Chicago Public Schools and he was appointed by President Obama secretary of education 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 eventually implement a radical national curriculum which would be highly critical of our country and the West, such as it is described in Howard Zinn’s book. She received a $176 million grant from 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 many organizations supported by George Soros.
All the Marxists who are presently working on the Common Core social studies standards are disciples and admirers of communist Howard Zinn and his infamous book , A People’s History of the United States, which was written from a Marxist and a hate the USA perspective. They want a revisionist Marxist American history so that the United States will be change to a socialist/Marxist society. They have been quite successful in their diabolical endeavor by brainwashing our young people in schools over the period of years, but specially at colleges and universities.
This is why Obama received a majority of the votes from young people in 2008 and 2012. Some have now realized that they were fooled by Obama. President Obama’s disastrous economic policies has brought a situation that has never happened in our history; and that is that over 50% of the college graduates have not found employment in the field that they studied and are now carrying an enormous debt that they are unable to repay.
Fortunately, many parents and teachers which are being supported conservative and even by some liberal organizations are fighting Common Core across the nation. As indicated several states that signed to adopt Common Core, after being bribed with funds from the Obama administration, have now repealed it in their state legislatures. However, Governor Rick Scott and the Florida legislature have not yet seen the light and are still implementing Obama’s Common Core.
There is no question that Governor Scott reelection will suffer, if he doesn’t repeal it before November 2014. The governor of Florida needs to stop listening to former Governor Jeb Bush, and listen instead to the conservatives who supported him four years ago, which are now deeply disenchanted.
Scott needs to join other Republican governors and kill Common Core. He could even lose his reelection, as many conservative and Tea Party people may stay home. I will vote for Governor Scott in November 2014 and will continue working to persuade the governor and the members of the Florida legislature to repeal it. As for Jeb Bush, he may find that conservatives will reject him massively as a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016 for strongly supporting Obama’s damaging Common Core.
Who was Howard Zinn?
Howard Zinn was born on August 24, 1922 and died on January 27, 2010. He was an American historian, author, playwright, and social activist who taught at Boston University for 24 years. Professor Zinn also taught at Spelman College for seven years but he was fired even though he was a tenured professor for his involvement in the civil rights movement. He wrote more than 20 books. Many of his books dealt with civil rights, antiwar movements and the labor history of the nation.
During World War II, Zinn served in the Air Force as a bombardier and dropped many bombs on the enemy. Zinn questioned the justifications for military operations that inflicted massive civilian casualties during the World War II, the Vietnam War, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also criticized the Gulf War.
Zinn believed that the point of view expressed in traditional history books was often limited and inaccurate. Biographer Martin Duberman stated that when he was asked directly if he was a Marxist, Zinn replied, “Yes, I’m something of a Marxist.” He was a friend of other Marxists intellectuals, such as Noam Chomsky. He was opposed to the Vietnam War and visited Hanoi, North Vietnam in January 1968.
Howard Zinn’s Socialist/Marxist ideology
Zinn described himself as “something of an anarchist, something of a socialist, and something of a Marxist.” He suggested looking at socialism in its full historical context as a popular, positive idea that got a bad name from its association with Soviet Communism.
Wikipedia explained that in 2009 in Madison, Wisconsin, Zinn said the following: “Let’s talk about socialism. I think it’s very important to bring back the idea of socialism into the national discussion to where it was at the turn of the [last] century before the Soviet Union gave it a bad name. Socialism had a good name in this country. Socialism had Eugene Debs. It had Clarence Darrow. It had Mother Jones. It had Emma Goldman. It had several million people reading socialist newspapers around the country. Socialism basically said, hey, let’s have a kinder, gentler society.
Let’s share things. Let’s have an economic system that produces things not because they’re profitable for some corporation, but produces things that people need. People should not be retreating from the word socialism because you have to go beyond capitalism.”
Zinn wanted American history to be taught exclusively from his Marxist point of view in all schools, colleges and universities in the nation. Sadly, he was partly successful. In 2008, he established the Zinn Education Project as his perverse legacy to middle and high school teachers and their students. The nonprofit organization offers classroom teachers free and low-cost teaching activities based on A People’s History and like-minded history texts.
The Zinn Education Project was launched to promote and support the use of A People’s History of the United States (and other materials) for teaching in middle and high school classrooms across the United States. With funds from an anonymous donor who had been a student of Zinn, the project began by distributing 4,000 packets to teachers in all states and territories. The project now offers teaching guides and bibliographies that can be freely downloaded.
FBI files
Wikipedia reported that the Federal Bureau of Investigation(FBI) released a file with 423 pages of information on Howard Zinn’s life and activities. The FBI opened a domestic security investigation on Zinn (FBI File # 100-360217), based on Zinn’s activities in what the agency considered to be communist front groups and informant reports indicated that Zinn was an active member of the Communist Party of the United States. Zinn denied ever being a member and said that he had participated in the activities of various organizations which might be considered Communist fronts but that his participation was motivated by his belief that in this country people had the right to believe, think, and act according to their own ideals.
Howard Zinn Continues His Assault on America From Beyond the Grave. The most effective weapon of destruction ever leveled against the USA is not the soldier, the tank, the submarine, or even the nuclear-armed ICBM, it’s Howard Zinn.
Wikipedia pointed out that In 2008, Howard Zinn was selected as a special senior advisor to the Nicaraguan priest and Marxist Sandinista Miguel d’Escoto who was president of the United Nations General Assembly. It explained that the Associated Press (AP) stated in July 2013 that former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels asked for assurance from his education advisors that Zinn’s works were not taught in K-12 public schools in the state. Daniels also wanted a “cleanup” of K-12 professional development courses to eliminate “propaganda and highlight (if there is any) the more useful offerings.”
Daniels expressed contempt for Zinn upon his death and said the following: “This terrible anti-American academic has finally passed away…The obits and commentaries mentioned his book, A People’s History of the United States, is the ‘textbook of choice in high schools and colleges around the country.’ It is a truly execrable, anti-factual piece of disinformation that misstates American history on every page. Can someone assure me that it is not in use anywhere in Indiana? If it is, how do we get rid of it before more young people are force-fed a totally false version of our history?” David J. Bobb supported Daniels’ stand on Zinn by writing an opinion piece in the online Wall Street Journal, where he claimed that Zinn was not a real historian, but a Marxist-propagandist.
Conclusion
The rebellion against Common Core is going to grow across the United States. Our organization Bear Witness Central has been fighting Common Core from the very beginning. I have written several articles denouncing Obama’s Common Core and in my recent book America in Decline (2014), I included a 29-page chapter on the damaging Common Core. Additionally, I have attacked Obama’s Common Core on radio and television and in conferences in many cities of Florida.
As a former middle school and high school principal, region director and region superintendent, associate superintendent for curriculum, and interim deputy superintendent of schools of the Miami-Dade County Public Schools and a former visiting associate professor of social studies at Florida International University, I would not have liked an illegal national curriculum to have been imposed on the schools of our beloved country. Even less a history book, such as the one written by Howard Zinn, to be used in our secondary schools that has had such a great influence on Bill Ayers and other radicals working on the social studies standards .
The anti-American book written by Zinn is biased and it offers a distorted view of American history, as was documented by noted historians from prominent universities. The minds of our students should not be poisoned by books such as Zinn’s.
By his own admission, Howard Zinn considered himself as an anarchist, a socialist, and a somewhat Marxist. Zinn’s FBI file revealed that he participated in various organizations that were considered Communist fronts. The socialism/Marxism that Howard Zinn advocated had brought economic stagnation, high unemployment, high inflation and near bankruptcy to the nations that have implemented this failed economic system. I do not believe that middle schools and high schools in the nation should use a toxic book written by a Marxist who advocated socialism/Marxism for our nation as well as to erase our national boundaries and redistribute the wealth of the United States around the world. This would be national suicide and the end of the United States and free world as we now know it.
It is my belief that the unconstitutional Obama’s Common Core and Zinn’s book has no place in the United States. The rest of the states that have not yet discarded Obama’s Common Core need to do it pronto.
