The thing that boggles my mind is the number of people who, though I might not care for them or their politics all the time, I generally consider to be sufficiently intelligent that I would trust them with elective office, actually support Common Core: Jeb Bush, Bill Gates, Mike Huckabee and a few others. Have they read this stuff? Have they tried to understand the math? Common Core is awful! I just don't understand how anybody with any common sense can support it.

In an effort to free the highly intelligent students from the clutches of the collectivists in education, I earned a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology. The university I attended (sub-Ivy but not sub-par) had promised me that my dissertation could be on the difference between the truly gifted and the merely smart, i.e., that the truly gifted do not think merely twice as fast and twice as accurately as the putative smarties, but qualitatively as well as quantitatively differently. The dissertation and its research were essentially done but – as it offended the egalitarians – I was required to do an alternative dissertation to earn “the letters” (Ph.D.); the alternative dissertation was essentially a POS (a term widely used at Goldman Sachs, meaning piece-of-shit).
Much of education as practiced in this former Republic is the subjective denial of objective truth, e.g., “all children can learn,” as purveyed by those who claim that they can teach. Remember the old aphorism “those who can – do, those who can’t – teach”? There is a third clause, “those who can’t teach – teach teachers.”
The “Academy” has been largely rejected by the trades upon whose practice our life depends. The neurosurgeon and the guy-who-fixes-the-brakes-on-your-car each learn as apprentices to masters. The schoolmarm who teaches your kids – well intentioned though (s)he may be – is required to regale his or her students with stuff handed down from on high while attempting to keep the student inmates from taking over the school asylum. The difficulty of the teaching task is subsumed in the impossibility of the control task; the kids learn next-to-nothing whilst the hooligans enjoy the school “hood.”

Folks gave Obama and Bill Ayers a pass. Now it's biting us in the butt through our kids' education.

This article connects the dots and the people involved. Common Core has the goal of turning the US school system into training grounds for good little socialist, but not so smart that they can see through the garbage. Right now, locally, they are selling it to industry as a place where they will create future workers, but effective workers have to be able to think for themselves and in rational terms - these graduates will not be able to do that.
Why the ongoing surprise that Gates is involved? It baffles me. The man has stated in public meetings a desire to reduce carbon emissions via reduction in population, stating "vaccines are the way to go." Does this sound like a freedom loving, academics pushing man? This is a true producer, of software which will sell in Common Core schools, and an investor in mentioned vaccine company. Has anyone heard Gates speak out for liberty or freedom? The fact he associates and appears with Ayers at meetings says a lot. Then there is Huckabee and Jeb Bush, well the Bush family has been one world back to daddy. Remember Fred Thompson, running as a Republican, yet he is a member of the one world loving Council On Foreign Relations. Sadly, too many declaring themselves Republicans do not stand for past Republican ideas. As they communists predicted years ago, having infiltrated the Democrat Party of my early years, the line between the two has blurred and both have fallen for the collectivist line.

Commie Core is an amalgam of the worst of John Dewey's Progressive Education, Joseph Goebbels' Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. It's simply the logical descendant of The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America as described by Charlotte Iserbyt.

If you are familiar with Khan Academy, the free learning web site that a lot of home schoolers use, look into the fact that they support Common Core: https://www.khanacademy.org/commoncore

If you have Liberty minded friends that use Khan Academy, you should alert them to this.

Socialism is spelled this way "do it for the children" so they will not be left behind. No matter the cost or who has to pay for it. As long as WE who are in charge can get away with it.

Here's a post on the teaching of the 2nd amendment in schools FYI: http://savingourfuture.com/2014/03/middl...

Last week a local talk radio host claimed he had read the works of Karl Marx but he didn't know that Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto. I think the situation is much worse than we can imagine. This man is an educated individual with a college degree.

I have always loved learning, still do, and no doubt always will.

However, I HATED school, with a passion. I despised the not-so-subtle indoctrination that went along with the learning component of formal schooling. Grade school, high school, university; beyond the acquisition of skills and knowledge, it was like being in a brainwashing prison camp.

And now it seems as if Big Government is "doubling down" on the indoctrination with Common Core. Same old garbage, just wrapped in a shiny new package.

No, thanks; pass.

While I don't doubt that anything Obama has done is an attempt to further central Government control, there are way too many words in this article that never make a point.

We should insist that all government spending is assessed on a regular basis to see that it is actually accomplishing what was intended... in the case of government schools... educating students. The usual problem with this is that per standard government bureaucracy procedures the persons being assessed (education bureaucrats, government school administrators/teachers... NOT the students) were tasked with doing the assessing. At best they totally screw it up and at worst they flat out cheat but what they absolutely do not do is disclose that our government school systems have failed their students and the students parents.

I am just starting to get caught up on this issue.
Very interesting and troubling.