“Anytime you’ve got a one size fits all attitude regarding education, it’s never good for the students, the parents, or education in general,..”

Have you been hearing about the “Common Core State Standards”? Here is a video which explains the frightening concept and which explains that this is just one component of a larger agenda. The speaker, Jane Robbins of the American Principles Project, begins the explanation with the Race to the Top program, but the roots of transformation of education began decades ago. A significant year was 1965 when federal moneys were first given to states bringing federal mandates to local districts, and another critical year was 1994 when Goals 2000 and the School-to-Work Opportunities Act were passed. President Obama’s Race to the Top program is the most recent step in the destruction of American education. Local control has been systematically destroyed. Please watch all five parts of this video.

“Charter schools have become a parallel school system unto themselves, a system controlled largely by for-profit management companies and private landlords — one and the same, in many cases — and rife with insider deals and potential conflicts of interest.” — Miami Herald

All Charter schools must follow the same learning standards as each other and as the public schools, according to the initiative. Read more about this….

A change in privacy laws included in the Stimulus bill of 2009 will allow your child’s private information to be shared by agencies and individuals. Watch the video.

Teachers are the latest scapegoat in the attempt to improve education. Bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. and legislators in Olympia are devising ways of assessing students and collecting student data for evaluating teachers and principals. Bureaucrats should allow districts the freedom of local control and allow those closest to the students to find appropriate solutions.

Veteran teacher Bob Dean describes what unintended consequences are likely to occur in his commentary in The Columbian.

The federal law “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) required that ALL children must be proficient in math and language arts by 2014. It was a noble goal, but it was unrealistically naive. Now states want relief…..

Money can’t buy everything, it’s true…..but it can buy quite a lot. This article explains how major foundations–primarily the Gates, Broad, and Walton Foundations– influence national education policy.

One of the concepts in the federal Race to the Top initiative is the evaluating of teachers and administrators to reward–or punish–them according to their “effectiveness”…. but this view does not recognize or attack the deeper problems.

“….But are the Common Core Standards really “revolutionary”? Or are they fundamentally the same as the sets of standards that currently exist in each of the 50 states, different only in their wording?….”