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Teachers Union Abruptly Breaks Rank On Common Core

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Photo Credit; YouTube In a major surprise, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the country’s second-largest teachers union, opened its biannual convention Friday by announcing a step back from its support for Common Core education standards.

The group, gathering in Los Angeles, announced that it will now provide monetary grants from its Innovation Fund for teachers who want to critique the standards or even write entirely new ones themselves.

The AFT’s executive council is also introducing a resolution, to be voted on at the convention, which would declare that the standards had noble intentions but have fallen short due to outside meddling and an inordinate focus on standardized tests.

The announcement came as part of a general opening address by AFT President Randi Weingarten.

“Some of you in this room think the standards should be jettisoned,” told thousands of assembled teachers. “Some of you, myself included, think they hold great promise, but they’ve been implemented terribly.”

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Surprise: Parents Don’t Support Common Core

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Photo Credit: TownHall Parents with school-aged children have a growing disdain for the Common Core State Standards, a new Rasmussen report found.

Just 34% of American Adults with children of elementary or secondary school age now favor requiring all schools nationwide to meet the same Common Core education standards. That’s an 18-point drop from 52% in early November of last year.

The Common Core website claimed it is a myth that “adopting common standards means bringing all states’ standards down to the lowest common denominator.” Parents and school teachers, however, are still incredulous. Principals in Hawaii even predicted a 30 percent drop in math and reading scores in the wake of the standards implementation.

A state with very low academic standards, such as West Virginia, may very well improve its system by adopting Common Core. At the same time, however, a state with high academic excellence, such as Massachusetts, will almost undoubtedly be hampered.

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Common Core Conundrum: So Toxic, Even Arne Duncan Refuses To Say It

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Photo Credit: YouTube The best way to promote a highly sensitive and controversial curriculum is by not actually mentioning it at all.

And that’s exactly what U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan did. At the 2014 annual National PTA convention in Austin, Texas, on June 20, he gave an entire speech about Common Core without ever actually saying “Common Core.”

Instead, Duncan referred to Common Core as “standards,” a word he used nine times. He talked about how people “came together to develop these college- and career-ready standards” and how ”43 states will be moving forward this fall with new, higher, better academic standards that they chose.”

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Generals Defend Common Core

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Photo Credit: REUTERS / Kacper PempelAs another state debates whether to withdraw from the controversial Common Core multi-state education standards, input is coming from a surprising source: the military.

In North Carolina, where a bill potentially pulling the state out of Common Core is being hashed out between the state house and senate, a group called Mission: Readiness deployed several retired generals to make the case that Common Core isn’t merely sound educational policy, but also vital to the nation’s defense interests.

While serving military officers are generally expected to avoid politics, retired generals have no such limitations, and several were in Raleigh Thursday for a press conference urging the state to stay the course. The standards, they said, provided high standards as well as accountability and consistency for the state’s students, teachers, and parents.

One of the generals speaking was Lt. General Marvin Covault, a former chief of staff for NATO forces in Southern Europe who now lives in North Carolina. The standards, he said, would be invaluable for ensuring the U.S. military has the largest possible pool of qualified recruits.

“The education that this nation is providing to its youth is, in my opinion, a national disgrace,” Covault told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “The military has a vested interest in this, because we need to have a continuous pool of talented young people to fill the ranks.”

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Parent: Why I Can’t ‘In Good Conscience’ Leave My Kids in Public School

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Photo Credit: Washington Post(By Lynne Rigby) The letter is addressed to Florida Gov. Rick Scott, Seminole County Schools Superintendent Walt Griffin, state Sen. David Simmons, state Rep. Karen Castor Dentel, Bear Lake Elementary School Principal Alex Agosto, and Bear Lake Assistant Principal Virginia Brouillard.

There are some abbreviations in the letter that you may not recognize: VPK is voluntary prekindergarten; FCAT is the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Tests, the state-mandated exams that have been used for years for “accountability” purposes in school districts across the state but which are being replaced by a new test aligned to new Florida standards and being designed by the American Institutes for Research, or AIR. The new Florida Standards in math and Language Arts were approved earlier this year after the state pulled out of the Common Core State Standards initiative and devised their own, which actually look a great deal like the Core. EOCs are end-of-course exams. SCPS is Seminole County Public Schools.

Dear Governor Scott, Mr. Griffin, Mrs. Stewart, David Simmons, Karen Castor Dentel, Mr. Agosto and Mrs. Brouillard and Seminole County School Board Members,

I am a parent of five children in Seminole County Schools aged 4 (VPK) to 16. My husband and I are deeply embedded in this community. We are both successful products of Lake Brantley High School and the middle schools that fed into it. I graduated from the University of Georgia in 1995 and came back to Seminole to teach Kindergarten at Pinecrest and Wekiva; he is currently the pitching coach for the Lake Brantley varsity baseball team. Our ties run deep. We stayed here so our kids would be blessed with a similar educational experience and opportunities.

This year has been completely disheartening for us. You see, I’ve been okay with FCAT…show what you know, I get it….some sort of accountability. That was until this year. My third grade son, Jackson, the fourth of my four boys has had mostly As, a scattering of Bs through his Bear Lake career, much like his brothers. However, he has had the Discovery Education tests added to his school year. I saw his score on DE in first grade and it was scary low, in the 20s. But he had 1s and his teacher said that she knows him and he was doing fine with nothing to worry about. Same thing in 2nd grade, though, knowing that FCAT was looming, I began to panic a bit. We read out loud together each night through the summer, talked about the books as we read and I believed that that would pay off on the first DE test of 3rd grade because he was doing really well. I was wrong. His first DE test was similar to others but now his teachers start panicking because their pay depends on it. He is sent to remedial LEAP and ultimately a math pullout group. All the while, he has mostly As and a few Bs.

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10 Reasons You Should Oppose Common Core (+video)

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Photo Credit: YouTubeBelow are ten more reasons from Freedom Works on why Common Core education standards are an absolute disaster for our country’s children, parents, and teachers.

1. Common Core is a federal takeover of education

The ultimate goal of Common Core is to have every school district follow the same national standards. This is a failed educational approach that will undermine educational quality and choice. States and local communities better know how to design standards based on their students and parents’ needs than Washington bureaucrats.

2. Common Core is Bad for Parents

Parents will not have a say in their child’s education under Common Core. They will not be able to suggest changes to their local school’s standards or enroll their child in another public school with better standards. Common Core would limit parental choice and shut their voices out of their child’s education.

3. Common Core is Bad for Teachers

Teachers would have little control over their classrooms under Common Core. They will be forced to comply with standards decided upon by federal bureaucrat. This leaves little to no room for teachers to innovate to meet the unique needs of their students.

4. Common Core is Bad for Taxpayers

Common Core has a hefty price tag that will be paid by taxpayers in states. Washington State Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction estimates that Common Core will cost the state$300 million. California Department of Education estimates it will cost $759 million to implement the nationalized standards. Common Core will cost taxpayers a lot of money while not improving education quality.

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Arizona Ditches Common Core Testing Consortium

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Photo Credit: REUTERS / Joshua LottArizona Gov. Jan Brewer announced Friday that her state is pulling out of a multi-state consortium that is designing a national test that applies new Common Core education standards.

Arizona was an early governing member of the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC, bu Brewer’s office announced that effective June 8 the state would be disassociating itself.

PARCC is one of two major constortia that is trying to create a common test for states that have adopted Common Core national education standards. With Arizona’s withdrawal, 15 states and the District of Columbia are members, though only nine are firmly committed to using PARCC’s tests.

The decision to pull out does not affect Arizona’s current adherence to Common Core, whose implementation will continue as planned. In addition, the decision doesn’t necessarily mean Arizona will not ultimately use PARCC to supply its standardized test, as PARCC will be allowed to submit its tests for possible use.

The government’s statement says the state has no problems with PARCC, but rather must disassociate itself to avoid any conflict of interest as it evaluates different bids to provide standardized tests to more than 1 million Arizona students.

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Letter Campaign Urges Oklahoma’s Mary Fallin to Repeal Common Core

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Photo Credit: APIn the wake of the Oklahoma state legislature’s overwhelming approval of a bill to repeal and replace the Common Core standards, Restore Oklahoma Public Education (R.O.P.E.) has begun a letter-writing campaign to urge Fallin to sign the bill.

Gov. Mary Fallin (R) of Oklahoma could become the first governor in the nation to fully repeal the Common Core standards. Fallin has until June 2 to sign HB3399; if she chooses not to, the bill will die by pocket veto.

“We must begin IMMEDIATELY to ask our Governor to sign this bill into law,” R.O.P.E. president Jenni White writes on the group’s website. “Toward that end, we have written two separate letters. One is for Oklahomans to use and the other may be used by anyone outside the state who would like to participate.”

R.O.P.E. urges:

* Copy and paste the letter of your choice (you can modify them or write your own as well) into an email. Sample letters for both Oklahomans and Americans from other states are available on the R.O.P.E. website.

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WATCH: Teacher Says He Helped Write Common Core to End White Privilege

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Photo Credit: YouTube A teacher told attendees at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics Monday night that he helped write the controversial Common Core education standards to end white privilege.

Dr. David Pook, a professor at Granite State College and chair of the History department at The Derryfield School in Manchester, New Hampshire, argued in favor of Common Core.

“The reason why I helped write the standards and the reason why I am here today is that as a white male in society I am given a lot of privilege that I didn’t earn.”

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Common Core: ObamaCare for Education

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Photo Credit: The American Spectator Common Core. Rutgers and Condi Rice. Brandeis and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Smith College and Christine LaGarde. Glenn Beck, Jeb Bush, and Chris Christie.

Amid all the swirling controversies over campus commencement speakers, seemingly in a separate corner of the political universe another controversy swirls over Common Core. In fact? They are the same controversy. Not to mention the battle for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination. You could, in fact, call Common Core Obamacare for Education.

Let’s start with an appearance on the O’Reilly show the other night by Glenn Beck. Holding up an exercise on “Possessive Nouns” Beck read the problems a third grade grammar school student had to solve as a homework assignment. The exercise involved making “each sentence less wordy by replacing words with a possessive noun phrase.”

Possessive nouns. Simple and uncontroversial enough, yes? Here are the six sentences, the “wordy” sentence first and the grammatically correct version second, exactly as sequentially presented by Common Core.

1. The job of a president is not easy.
A president’s job is not easy.

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