WIN THE COMMON CORE BATTLE BUT LOSE THE WAR?
By
Charlotte Iserbyt
August 21, 2013
NewsWithViews.com
This article relates to my serious concern that Common Core (CC) is being used as a very effective DIVERSION from the serious problem of tax-supported school choice which will lock up ALL children worldwide in the computerized Communist / OBE workforce training system necessary for a planned global economy. This is the communist education system referred to by Professor Eugene Boyce, University of Georgia, where "they do not educate for jobs that don't exist"—a.k.a., "quota system." This is the plan referred to by education researcher Cynthia Weatherly as "limited learning for lifelong labor." No upward mobility for our children.
Once the world's children are trapped in that tax-funded system (which has been the international plan over many years, using innocent-sounding "school choice/vouchers/tuition tax credits") they will be required by Federal law to submit to Common Core and all that goes with it. Duston Heuston of Utah's World Institute for Computer Assisted Teaching spoke regarding parents being left out of the loop when he said,
We’ve been absolutely staggered by realizing that the computer has the capability to act as if it were ten of the top psychologists working with one student. You’ve seen the tip of the iceberg. Won’t it be wonderful when the child in the smallest country in the most distant area or in the most confused urban setting can have the equivalent of the finest school in the world on that terminal and no one can get between that child and that curriculum? We have great moments coming in the history of education.
Let's take a look at just two of the major players supporting tax-funded school choice:
1) Ex-IBM CEO Louis B. Gerstner has called on President Obama to dismantle 16,000 school districts, which simply means to strip them of their elected boards. See Wall Street Journal, 12/1/2008, "Lessons from 40 years of Education Reform: Let's abolish local school districts and finally adopt national standards";
and
2) Long-time education change agent, Chester E. Finn, Jr., who supports tax-funded school choice/charters, and in an article entitled "Why Private Schools Are Dying Out" (The Wall Street Journal, 5/16/13) virtually called for the collapse of private education. Thirty-one years ago Finn, in an article entitled "Public Service, Public Support, Public Accountability" published in the March 1982 issue of the National Association of Secondary School Principals' Bulletin, said,
Short of scattering money in the streets or handing it out to everyone who wants some, the funding agency must define eligible recipients...this means, in a word, “regulation,” the inevitable concommitant of public financial support.
Parents supporting publicly-funded school choice should read that warning from Finn who obviously has not really changed his mind over the past 31 years. He has just officially joined the enemy camp of local (parent/taxpayer) control of education, those supporting tax-funded school choice with no elected boards. Taxation without representation.
There is something very evil afoot here and it breaks my heart to see so many good Americans, mainly Moms, cooperating in the demise of our pre-1965, highly successful education system and the very capitalist economic system that has drawn millions of foreigners to our shores in order to experience upward mobility through political and economic freedom. They could not be aware that the plan to change our capitalist economic system to a planned economy was cooked up many years ago by the Carnegie Corporation of New York which has been involved for many years with education restructuring--implementation of the detested Outcomes Based Education, the education agreements with the Soviet Union, and most recently with the restructuring of American Education (Marc Tucker, et al). The whole treasonous plan is spelled out in Carnegie's little book entitled Conclusions and Recommendations for the Social Studies (1934). Professor Harold Laski, professor of British Socialism, said, " …at bottom, and stripped of its carefully neutral phrases, the Report is an educational program for a socialist America." (This book can be downloaded at http//www.americandeception.com.)
The role of the tax-exempt Left (Carnegie, Ford, Rockefeller Foundations, and Leftists in Congress and elsewhere in our states) in the demise of our free nation is to be expected.
However, the key role since 1980 (Reagan Administration) of neo-conservative tax-exempt foundations and their Trotskyite leadership must also be addressed. The fact that the Heritage Foundation, that supported the drafting of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), is the leading group spearheading the attack on Common Core across the nation, but is also the leading group supporting tax-funded school choice/charter proposals, should raise eyebrows. This is an exquisite example of the "dialectic at work":
(1) Thesis--Richard Allen of Heritage Foundation drafts NAFTA which destroys American jobs by sending them abroad. Here is an interesting quote regarding the true purpose of Free Trade out of the mouth of Karl Marx, Brussels, Belgium, 1848: "Free trade breaks up old nationalities...in a word, the free trade system hastens social revolution."
(2) Anti-thesis-- Heritage Foundation and other Council for National Policy Trotskyite tax-exempt foundations recommend tax-funded school choice/charters in order to destroy traditional American academic education run by elected boards, and replace it with the Soviet polytech workforce training system--no grades A-F, no grades K-12, graduate at age 14 or 21, individual education plans, with no competition. (Google the Reinventing School Coalition [RISC] program for more information.)
(3) Synthesis--The afore-mentioned actions will result in changing our capitalist economic system to a global planned economy, recommended in 1934 by the Carnegie Corporation. The Heritage Foundation, which has affiliates in most states, was very influential in President Reagan's signing the education agreements with Gorbachev in 1985.
The tax-exempt Carnegie Corporation, that well-known education researcher and prolific writer, Dennis Cuddy, Ph.D, refers to as the “Carnegie Department of Education,” has been involved every five years or so with multi-million dollar grants to fund: the National Assessment of Educational Progress (the original extremely controversial Common Core); the regional government Education Commission of the States; the United States-USSR (Soviet) Agreements, 1985, which merged the two education systems; adoption of the Pavlovian/Skinnerian method (Outcomes Based Education) necessary for workforce training, and more recently, Marc Tucker's "National Alliance for Restructuring Education," etc. (Google Marc Tucker's letter to Hillary Clinton)
BOTTOM LINE: WHOEVER IS DIRECTING THIS ANTI- COMMON CORE MOVEMENT IS PUTTING THE CART BEFORE THE TROJAN HORSE!
If only Americans would focus on the real problem, STOPPING TAX-SUPPORTED SCHOOL CHOICE! ONCE PUBLIC AND PRIVATE EDUCTION HAVE BEEN CORPORATIZED (TAKEN OVER BY THE CORPORATE FASCIST – PUBLIC/PRIVATE PARTNERSHIP SYSTEM) THOSE SCHOOLS WILL BE REQUIRED BY LAW TO IMPLEMENT COMMON CORE. What will parents, unhappy about this turn of events, then do? There will be no elected boards to whom they can complain.
Game over.
There
is another point I'd like to make. By scrutinizing the standards set
in the Common Core our good people are acknowledging the right of the
Federal government to be involved in a national curriculum. Our people
should have in the very beginning told Congress: "No, we
don't care whether your CC teaches the Ten Commandments or the Communist
Manifesto. The federal government has NO constitutional right to impose
any kind of national curriculum and test on the children and teachers
of America." That would have surely slowed down the Communist
Core freight train that is approaching the station where America will
no longer have a capitalist economy.
It will be a sad day for America when the hundreds of thousands of good
Americans fighting and possibly winning their battle to get rid of CC
(WHO ARE NOT TAKING THE VITALLY IMPORTANT NO. 1 STAND AGAINST TAX-SUPPORTED
SCHOOL CHOICE) find out that their carefully selected, tax-supported
charter or private or religious or home school is required by law to
use Common Core and their children are being trained for the workforce,
not educated for life. Hasn't anyone thought about that? All those Moms
on this anti-Common Core bandwagon will then realize they fought and
won a battle, only to lose the war. C.S. Lewis, the noted British writer,
put it well when he said, “When training beats education, civilization
dies.”
And, speaking of fighting battles, only to lose wars: think of the number of Americans who have fought and died in wars, ostensibly to keep our nation free from the very communist political and economic system being imposed on us through innocent-sounding publicly-funded school choice!
Please read this incredibly shocking article from The Effective School Report, February, 1992. It covers everything going on under tax-supported school choice.
THE EFFECTIVE SCHOOL REPORT’S FEBRUARY 1992 ISSUE CARRIED AN ARTICLE ENTITLED “Free Education in a Free Society” by Nick Zienau of England’s Educational Consultancy. It reads in part:
This article describes a project which began at a conference organized in September 1991 to discuss possibilities for projects between East and West which might assist the process of educational reform in Russia and the other republics formerly of the USSR.... An important part of becoming convinced that this was worthwhile was to discover that there was a common set of values and ideas about the changes facing education systems whether in Russia, the U.S. or Europe.… A key theme for us was, therefore, that those ideas which hitherto have been seen as progressive alternatives and often dangerously radical in educational theory and practice will increasingly become part of mainstream education practice and thinking. A second key principle was the idea that increasingly education will cease to be a state monopoly and must have a relationship with the free market. This seems related to the idea of individual enterprise and choice. Our belief is that it is helpful to educational reform and therefore to this project to form collaborative relationships between the state and organizations acting in the free market. This will help to allow individual autonomy, enterprise, etc., to flourish and allow relationships between those involved in reform not to be based on fixed budgets and supply side economics. It will require us to have clear contracts between participants. If we have ideas about how to go about training teachers, we will learn these best from each other by doing it together and that only in this way can the project be effective as an educational intervention between nations, between innovators or between individuals.
…We believe in an exchange of learning and in the idea that there is likely to be as much that the West can learn from eastern partners as the other way around. We believe that a key to what this learning might be about is that the West’s knowledge of how to do things in education, how to make changes for instance in the technology, is matched by pedagogic systems and theories which have been highly developed in Russia. We believe that these theories and practices can form the basis of radical curriculum innovation and organizational reform.
Finally, we believe in a project that has an organic structure. It will have two nodes, one in the east and one in the west, and it will span three continents. It will have a core structure which must have a small financial base and it will have participating organizations and individuals. However, the form of the organization must be one in which projects can be developed from the center core and not controlled by it. Participants should be free to create these without relying on central funding or permission as long as they can fit into this set of agreed values which the project will develop.
First among these is the theme of teacher education (both pre- and in-service). We see this as the key way of changing and influencing education… Thirdly, we hope to gain the active involvement of industry and commerce. It will be the concern of the project to encourage such collaboration on both sides, both in the Eastern consortium and in the Western consortium. We understand it as an important way of ensuring that education is relevant to society, understood and cared about, and seen as connected to sources of wealth creation in society. Certainly in the East and also, we would venture, increasingly in the West, active involvement of industry and commerce is essential in order to obtain the funds and commitment necessary for educational reform to succeed. This means that in practice we will take every available opportunity to involve actively avantgarde leaders of industry and commerce both in funding, supporting and implementing the project. The important criteria for collaboration must be that there is sufficient congruence of ethics and values about the goals and methods of the project.
Fourthly, in order to “practice what we preach,” we believe that our meetings and project events do actively demonstrate and work with the pedagogic systems, that the learning should be managed in a conscious way. We therefore will make it a feature of the project that we focus on the skills and strategies of managing learning in an international context whether it be in the seminars, conferences, exchange trips or consultations. Fifth, it will be important to formulate structures and models of organization that encourage independence and autonomy through small groups.... The education reform process will be built on the work of many small groups making their own decisions. We will need to build into our project structure of contract making, interdependence with autonomy and hold it within a regulated and boundaried field of action. These kinds of structures and models are new forms of organization for both East and West and represent a move away from hierarchy and role-dominated cultures.
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The Consortium activity has the official support of the Minister of Education for the Russian Republic, Dr. Edouard Dneprov, and a close liaison has been established with the Ministry. On the Western side, the consortium at present includes consultants, trainers, and researchers from the UK, Netherlands and the USA who aim in the first place to act as a bridge into the various educational networks in the West. These will include higher education initiatives, networks of alternative schools, organizations involved in innovative teacher training, consulting organizations, industrial and commercial organizations concerned with pedagogical innovation. They are also currently working to obtain funding and support among possible private and public sector sponsors. --Signed Nick Zienau
[Ed. Note, 1999: Considerable space has been devoted to quotes from The Effective School Report due to their obvious close relationship to activities in American education restructuring; i.e., choice, charter schools, school-business partnerships, school-to-work legislation, The New American Schools Development Corporation, site-based management, merger of public and private sectors, and the Skinnerian workforce training methodology. This important article justifies the validity of concerns expressed by Americans opposed to the U.S.-Soviet and Carnegie-Soviet education agreements signed in 1985 by President Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Carnegie Corporation and the then-Soviet Academy of Sciences, respectively.]
An updated, abridged version of “The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America” can be purchased from NewsWithViews on their online store front.
� 2013 Charlotte T. Iserbyt - All Rights Reserved
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