WASHINGTON, D.C. – A veteran educator says parents can thank Hillary Clinton for the Common Core national standards that have been thrust upon schools across the country.
Even though most people probably believe that Common Core was developed during President Barack Obama’s term in office, the foundation of the initiative goes all the way back to the 1980s, reports veteran educator and now-commentator Donna Garner.
Back then, she tells EAGnews Hillary Clinton worked with other left-leaning education reformers such as Marc Tucker of the National Committee on Education and the Economy (NCEE), Ira Magaziner and then-Gov. Mario Cuomo, known for his fiery, liberal speeches.
The ‘Whatiscommoncore’ website reports that Tucker “has … openly worked for decades to strengthen the role of the state education agencies in education governance at the expense of local control” and claims that “the United States will have to largely abandon the beloved emblem of American education: local control.”
In 1992, Tucker wrote a letter to Clinton outlining his vision of a “communist-styled pipeline of education and workforce.”
Magaziner has a long association with the Clintons. In addition to working with Hillary on radical education reform, he worked with her on the failed Task Force to Reform Health Care during the Clinton Administration, served as senior policy advisor for President Clinton and, as of today, serves in a leadership capacity for two of the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation’s international development initiatives.
In the 1980s, Hillary (et al.) laid the groundwork for a School-to-Work plan, better known by the term “cradle-to-grave,” according to Garner. The idea was to create a three-legged stool of education, labor and healthcare whereby the government would direct people’s lives from birth until they die.
Garner, who began teaching in the early ‘60s in Texas, says all were to be joined together under one banner with government healthcare, school healthcare clinics providing abortions and contraceptives, classrooms emphasizing workforce development skills instead of academic knowledge and the Department of Labor directing students into a career pathway at a very early age.
Garner, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan and re-appointed by President George H. W. Bush to serve on the National Commission on Migrant Education, says the idea was “that students and everybody else would be tracked into the vocation that the government at the time thought was important. And it didn’t have anything to do with students’ natural desires or what their parents wanted them to do or what the students’ talents were. It all had to do with providing ‘worker bees’ for the government.”
And as insidious as the plan sounds, it has come to be under the Common Core national standards initiative, she says.
She further states the goal was to have about 10% of the population be well educated and then the other 90% would be trained to function within factories and companies.
Jane Robbins of the American Principles Project tells EAGnews, “When it was called School-to-Work 20 years ago, it was a fad for awhile and then it fell apart. And now it’s a fad again. But this time they are really focusing on cementing this through Common Core through federal money because the people who are influential in the progressive ed world are people….people like Marc Tucker…who has been an advocate of all of this forever. He thinks the schools should just be part of one, vast human development resource system and he’s been arguing that for decades.”
Known now as Student Learning Plans (SLPs), sixth graders in a growing number of states, along with their parents and a school counselor, develop career paths for the coming six years until the students are graduated. Robbins says this is all connected to the Common Core national standards initiative, which has never been an education model but a workforce development model. It’s not meant to produce many educated citizens.
Prior to “cradle-to-grave,” schools focused on academic-based content called Type #1. That involved memorization and drills comprised of basic education fundamentals.
Garner says once that was accomplished, students were enabled to do higher level reasoning. A 1991 report, The Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills, however, helped to change the direction of the nation’s schools from knowledge-based academic content (Type #1) into a education philosophy where the emphasis is on emotions, opinions and beliefs with an emphasis on workplace competencies (Type #2).
According to Garner, the standards movement popped up all over the country. States appointed writing teams to rewrite all K-12 courses, and the new standards required students “to be able to know and be able to do.”
She says, “We are living the plan that Hillary and her folks, her team, instigated back in the early ‘80s.”
The plan was delayed when George W. Bush was elected to office. But with Obama, another zealous Type #2 advocate, Garner says it’s the perfect storm, “that leads into relativism, into political correctness, multiculturalism, environmental extremism and then into the social justice agenda under Obama, which glorifies the LGBT community.”
Garner believes we have Hillary Clinton (et al.) to thank for the mess our country’s schools are in today. It is because of her Type #2 philosophy of education as birthed by the NCEE we now have the Common Core Standards Initiative pouring into our nation’s schools, capturing the College Board and its products (AP, SAT, PSAT), and making billions of dollars in profits for Bill Gates, Pearson, Jeb Bush, and others. Even the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is being rewritten to align with Common Core, she reports.
Parents need to lay the blame for Common Core right at Hillary’s feet, she says.
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Hillary Clinton The Governor’s Mansion 1800 Canter Street Little Rock, AR 72206 Dear Hillary: I still cannot believe you won. But utter delight that you did pervades all the circles in which I move. I met last Wednesday in David Rockefeller’s office with him, John Sculley, Dave Barram and David Haselkorn. It was a great celebration. Both John and David R. were more expansive than I have ever seen them — literally radiating happiness. My own view and theirs is that this country has seized its last chance. I am fond of quoting Winston Churchill to the effect that “America always does the right thing — after it has exhausted all the alternatives.” This election, more than anything else in my experience, proves his point. The subject we were discussing was what you and Bill should do now about education, training and labor market policy. Following that meeting, I chaired another in Washington on the same topic. Those present at the second meeting included Tim Barnicle, Dave Barram, Mike Cohen, David Hornbeck, Hilary Pennington, Andy Plattner, Lauren Resnick, Betsy Brown Ruzzi, Bob Schwartz, Mike Smith and Bill Spring. Shirley Malcom, Ray Marshall and Susan McGuire were also invited. Though these three were not able to be present at last week’s meeting, they have all contributed by telephone to the ideas that follow. Ira Magaziner was also invited to this meeting. Our purpose in these meetings was to propose concrete actions that the Clinton administration could take — between now and the inauguration, in the first 100 days and beyond. The result, from where I sit, was really exciting. We took a very large leap forward in terms of how to advance the agenda on which you and we have all been working — a practical plan for putting all the major components of the system in place within four years, by the time Bill has to run again. I take personal responsibility for what follows. Though I believe everyone involved in the planning effort is in broad agreement, they may not all agree on the details. You should also be aware that, although the plan comes from a group closely associated with the National Center on Education and the Economy, there was no practical way to poll our whole Board on this plan in the time available. It represents, then, not a proposal from our Center, but the best thinking of the group I have named. We think the great opportunity you have is to remold the entire American system for human resources development, almost all of the current components of which were put in place before World War II. The danger is that each of the ideas that Bill advanced in the campaign in the area of education and training could be translated individually in the ordinary course of governing into a legislative proposal and enacted as a program. This is the plan of least resistance. But it will lead to these programs being grafted onto the present system, not to a new system, and the opportunity will have been lost. If this sense of time and place is correct, it is essential that the administration’s efforts be guided by a consistent vision of what it wants to accomplish in the field of human resource development, with respect both to choice of key officials and the program. What follows comes in three places: First, a vision of the kind of national — not federal — human resources development system the nation could have. This is interwoven with a new approach to governing that should inform that vision. What is essential is that we create a seamless web of opportunities, to develop one’s skills that literally extends from cradle to grave and is the same system for everyone — young and old, poor and rich, worker and full-time student. It needs to be a system driven by client needs (not agency regulations or the needs of the organization providing the services), guided by clear standards that define the stages of the system for the people who progress through it, and regulated on the basis of outcomes that providers produce for their clients, not inputs into the system. Second, a proposed legislative agenda you can use to implement this vision. We propose four high priority packages that will enable you to move quickly on the campaign promises: [Page: E1820]
The other major proposal we offer has to do with government organization for the human resources agenda. While we share your reservations about the hazards involved in bringing reorganization proposals to the Congress, we believe that the one we have come up with minimizes those drawbacks while creating an opportunity for the new administration to move like lightning to implement its human resources development proposals. We hope you can consider the merits of this idea quickly, because, if you decide to go with it or something like it, it will greatly affect the nature of the offers you make to prospective cabinet members. We take the proposals Bill put before the country in the campaign to be utterly consistent with the ideas advanced in America’s Choice, the school restructuring agenda first stated in A Nation Prepared, and later incorporated in the work of the National Alliance for Restructuring Education, and the elaboration of this view that Ray and I tried to capture in our book, Thinking for a Living. Taken together, we think these ideas constitute a consistent vision for a new human resources development system for the United States. I have tried to capture the essence of that vision below.
An Economic Strategy Based on Skill Development
The Schools
Postsecondary Education and Work Skills
[Page: E1821] Education and Training for Employed and Unemployed Adults
Labor Market Systems
Some Common Features
This vision, as I pointed out above, is consistent with everything Bill proposed as a candidate. But it goes beyond those proposals, extending them from ideas for new programs to a comprehensive vision of how they can be used as building blocks for a whole new system. But this vision is very complex, will take a long time to sell, and will have to be revised many times along the way. The right way to think about it is as an internal working document that forms the background for a plan, not the plan itself. One would want to make sure that the specific actions of the new administration were designed, in a general way, to advance this agenda as it evolved, while not committing anyone to the details, which would change over time. Everything that follows is cast in the frame of strategies for bringing the new system into being, not as a pilot program, not as a few demonstrations to be swept aside in another administration, but everywhere, as the new way of doing business. In the sections that follow, we break these goals down into their main components and propose an action plan for each.
[Page: E1822]Major Components of the Program The preceding section presented a vision of the system we have in mind chronologically from the point of view of an individual served by it. Here we reverse the order, starting with descriptions of program components designed to serve adults, and working our way down to the very young. HIGH SKILLS FOR ECONOMIC COMPETITIVENESS PROGRAMDeveloping System Standards
Commentary:
Collaborative Design and Development Program
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The seeds for Common Core began to sprout under Bill Clinton’s administration thanks to Hillary and her associates. Then under Obama, these Common Core seedlings have grown into a complete takeover of our nation’s school system by the federal government.
According to Garner, “We have Hillary to blame for a nation of adult non-readers who get most of their news from their social media gadgets; and it is for that reason that I have used my institutional memory to try to educate those people who have no knowledge of Hillary Clinton. If she is to be a serious candidate for the Presidency, we must warn the public.”