Threatening State Heads on Common Core Education Standards Summarized as: Moms, You Can be Happy or You Can Go to Jail if You Decide to be Noncompliant

""Parents in South Carolina who are part of a nationwide revolt against Common Core say they are being threatened with “criminal accountability” if they prevent their children from taking the tests required by the controversial educational-standards program.

Tamra Hood, a member of South Carolina Parents Involved in Education, said the state Education Department’s Chief Operating Officer, Elizabeth Carpentier, warned parents could spend 30 days in jail if even a single day of testing is missed, Breitbart News reported.

In addition, Hood said Carpentier warned that groups that encourage parents to refuse the Common Core-aligned tests could be charged with aiding and abetting a crime.

A memo from South Carolina state education Superintendent Molly Spearman to districts bluntly declared there is “no statutory provision for parents to opt their children out of testing.”

Dino Teppara of the state agency’s public information office denied any threats were made and also denied that Carpentier said parents can be held criminally liable if they remove their children from school on testing days, insisting she “simply noted the truancy provisions in state statutes.”

In any case, Education Secretary Arne Duncan has clearly warned that if states don’t fix the problem of parents opting out, the federal government will “have an obligation to step in.”

Despite the insistence of supporters that Common Core is a state-driven education program, last week Duncan criticized parents who opt out of testing, charging they are hurting minorities and the disabled.

National Review Online reported Duncan’s position is that in the past, English language learners, students in special education and racial minorities were “swept under the rug.”

“Folks in the civil rights community, folks in the disability community, they want their kids being assessed. They want to know if they are making progress or growth,” he said.

In 2013, Duncan chalked up the opposition to Common Core to “white suburban moms who – all of a sudden – [realize] their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were, and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were.”

Resistance to Common Core, which has been adopted by 46 states, is building.

In Arkansas, a mother confronted the Arkansas State Board of Education about the program’s absurdly high demands, a high-school honors student in New Jersey blasted the testing publicly and an award-winning teacher in Ohio told a stunned audience she’s quitting because of Common Core.

Commenting on the resistance in New York state, where 184,000 of 1.1 million eligible students refused to take Common Core English exams earlier this month, renowned educator Diane Ravitch asked, “What if they threw a test and nobody took it? New York is about to find out,” the Long Island Press reported.

Common Core opponents have leaked a copy of an examination, and a number of states are formally taking action to withdraw from the requirements.

“Crimes of the Educators” reveals how the architects of America’s public school disaster implemented a plan to socialize the U.S. by knowingly and willingly dumbing down the population, a mission now closer to success than ever as the Obama administration works relentlessly to nationalize K-12 schooling with Common Core.

A parent in South Carolina, Artie Allen, has a Facebook page encouraging “Stop Common Core in South Carolina.”

He has no sympathy for state and district school officials fretting over funding-cut threats from the government.

“We got the sob story from one of our 3 kids schools that we kept our kids home from [testing] today that we could cause them to lose federal money. Maybe you should have thought about that before you took the money in the first place!! See what happens when you sleep with the devil.”

National Review Online pointed out that in Colorado, which voted for Obama twice, the state board approved a resolution that districts cannot be punished for test-taking rates, and lawmakers were working on a bill to protect parents who opt their children out of such tests.

The Home School Legal Defense Association noted Duncan did not clarify what he meant by “stepping in.”

“Duncan’s statements reflect a growing pressure on education bureaucrats to keep states locked into the Common Core,” HSLDA said. “Students nationwide are still opting out of voluntary benchmark assessments, which are meant to prepare them for all-day Common Core tests.”

HSLDA said it is “concerned that federal officials will again resort to financial incentives – or threaten to withhold funding – to coerce students into participating in these tests.”

“As demonstrated empirically by 2009′s ‘Race to the Top’ grants, state governments have a track record of prioritizing federal funds over their own sovereignty. Lured by the promise of funding, many cash-strapped states could not or would not resist the offer of billions of dollars in exchange for what seemed, at the time, a small sacrifice: adhering to a set of K-12 learning standards.”

The HSLDA report said that as “grassroots movements and parental opposition continues to dismantle Common Core piece by piece, concerned citizens should remain vigilant and take Duncan’s threats seriously.”

“Whenever the government threatens to ‘step in,’ the right of parents to be involved in their children’s education is bound to suffer,” the group’s report said.""

http://www.wnd.com/2015/04/state-threatening-anti-common-core-parents-with-jail/

Common Core (Marxist Socialism) Exams and Tests Absolute Refusal Movement Growing Strong Nationwide

""Tens of thousands of parents and students nationwide are engaging in civil disobedience by refusing to participate in federally mandated standardized tests, as states are fully deploying new exams aligned to the Common Core State Standards for the first time.

While the opt-out movement has gained steam from some looking to protest the controversial academic standards and what they say is an overemphasis on testing in schools, some of its leaders say it's about more than just those two things.

"Opt-out is not an anti-testing movement. This is a movement to reclaim and do what’s right for kids in public schools," says Tim Slekar, a leader of the United Opt Out movement in Wisconsin and dean of the school of education at Edgewood College. "This is a movement to restore real learning."

Spending on standards and tests, Slekar says, has taken away from funding music and arts programs, for example, and could be better allocated elsewhere.

"Why are the standards – the first ones we set – not, 'All kids will come to school not hungry, not sick and with access to books?'" Slekar says. "Those are some great standards, but yet those standards we're not allowed to go after."

"A place for testing is when it is given back to the classroom teacher," he adds. "Politicians have no business of being in the testing, teaching and learning business. They're the ones to blame for the fact that we have an increasing achievement gap … They're responsible for the absolute disaster we see in some of our poorer public schools."

The number of students who have chosen not to take the tests has varied, from a relative handful who have opted out to hundreds who have walked out in protest.

Widespread protests against the Common Core-aligned tests began last month, when states began administering exams created by the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) consortium. The other Common Core testing consortium, the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC), will begin administering exams in about 20 states later this month. Parents, teachers and school leaders have expressed concern that the tests may be too difficult or time-consuming, or that their schools' technology might not be up to snuff for what the tests require.

For many, the jury is still out on both the Common Core standards and the linked exams. Teach Plus, a nonprofit focused on placing effective teachers in urban schools, on Tuesday released a survey of more than 1,000 teachers in Boston, Chicago, Memphis, Nashville and the District of Columbia who evaluated sample PARCC questions. More than three-quarters – 79 percent – of teachers said the test items were better than what their states used to have, but there were mixed results on whether they were grade-appropriate or too challenging.

"As a teacher, we know developmentally some kids might not learn to read until the second grade," says Peggy Robertson, a former teacher and an administrator of the national United Opt Out group. "It's not like when a kid can’t walk you push them harder to walk. You wait and allow them to walk as they’re ready. Under Common Core, if you’re not reading at a particular level in kindergarten … you’re already being told you’re a failure. When you place these artificial standards on children and force them to comply to it, you set them up to hate learning and to hate reading."

Parents, too, are skeptical of the benefits of standardized testing. A 2014 PDK/Gallup survey showed that 68 percent of public school parents said they do not believe standardized tests are helpful to teachers. Parents were more supportive, though, of the idea of using tests to make decisions about grade-level promotions, graduation requirements and whether to award college credit.

At the same time, Congress is working to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind Act, which established annual standardized testing as a staple in public schools. Although the sweeping education law governs many different aspects of how federal funds are used in schools nationwide, the role of testing has been a major point of contention.

No Child Left Behind requires public school students to be tested once annually in math and English in third through eighth grade, and again in each subject once in high school. In total, federal mandates account for 17 tests students take throughout their academic careers: seven for English, seven for math and three grade-span tests (once each in elementary, middle and high school) for science.

Many state departments of education point to No Child Left Behind and state policies when discussing why they feel it's important that students are tested each year. But states' own policies on whether they allow students to opt out of annual testing vary widely.

Some states, such as Utah and California, very clearly allow students to opt out of annual testing for any reason, according to a research brief published by the Education Commission of the States. Others, such as Oregon and Pennsylvania, allow students to be excused from testing to accommodate religious beliefs.

But in states where testing opt-outs aren't allowed, guidance from departments of education "run along a spectrum from silence on the issue to state guidance or policies clearly prohibiting opt-outs," the brief says.""

Common Core Government Propaganda 

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/03/10/as-students-opt-out-of-common-core-exams-some-say-movement-is-not-about-testing

Obama Unveils National ObamaLaw Plan

President Barack Obama today introduced his plan for a progressive takeover of state and local policing.

""We have a great opportunity… to really transform how we think about community law enforcement relations,” he said Monday.

“We need to seize that opportunity… this is something that I’m going to stay very focused on in the months to come,” Obama said, as he touted a new interim report from his Task Force on 21st Century Policing.

Obama also instructed his media allies to help federalize policing, and to sideline the critics of centralized policing rules. “I expect our friends in the media to really focus on what’s in this report and pay attention to it,” he instructed.

Obama is using the crisis sparked by the August 2014 shooting of Michael Brown, who was killed after assaulting a shopkeeper and a policeman in Ferguson, Mo. Obama and his deputies stoked the subsequent controversy in the run-up to the 2014 election, in the hope of boosting African-American turnout. The mobilization effort failed, partly because local law-enforcement officials released a video showing Brown’s strong-arm robbery of a store shortly before the fatal shooting.

Now Obama is trying to expand progressive control by attaching more conditions to federal funding of state and local law-enforcement efforts. “We can expand the [federally-funded] COPS program… to see if we can get more incentives for local communities to apply some of the best practices and lessons that are embodied in this report,” he said.

Those best practices likely will eventually include rules that restrict police investigations of groups that are part of the Democratic coalition, and rules that try to lower convictions and penalties among favored sub-groups of the United States, regardless of the actual rates of illegal activity among those groups.

“I think communities [with police forces] across the board are going to need to consider… recommendations around prohibiting racial profiling [and] that’s a step that we’ve already taken at the federal level,” Obama said.

The report also calls for government to collect more data about state and local policing. That data will help federal officials impose new rules. “We need more information to find out how to take to scale best practices when it comes to training so that police officers are able to work in a way that reduces the possibilities of bias,“ Obama said.

State and local policing may need to be subordinated to federal social policy, Obama suggested. “Our approach to our drug laws, for example, and criminalization of nonviolent offenses rather than taking more of a public health approach — that may be something that has an impact in eroding trust between law enforcement and communities.”

Those political goals are echoed in the tasks force’s interim report.

“Law enforcement agencies should acknowledge the role of policing in past and present injustice and discrimination and how it is a hurdle to the promotion of community trust,” the report says. “The Federal Government, as well as state and local agencies, should encourage and incentivize higher education for law enforcement officers.”

Other recommendations include “Law enforcement agencies should engage community members in the training process…. [government] should ensure that basic recruit and in-service officer training include curriculum on the disease of addiction… Law enforcement agencies should implement training for officers that covers policies for interactions with the LGBTQ population, including issues such as determining gender identity for arrest placement, the Muslim, Arab, and South Asian communities, and immigrant or non-English speaking groups, as well as reinforcing policies for the prevention of sexual misconduct and harassment..”

Obama’s strategy matches the progressive playbook, which continuously expands progressives’ power by gradually adding more conditions to federal aid. That same strategy is implemented in education via the “Common Core” education plan, in the health-sector via Obamacare, in the banking industry via the mortgage rules that caused the damaging property bubble and in housing via Obama’s “regionalism” plan.  

That’s strategically different from prior Democratic administrations, which cited poverty as a justification for expanding federal aid. The unemployment rate for African-Americans in Ferguson is roughly 16 percent.""

In his Monday statement, Obama did not mention unemployment.

http://dailycaller.com/2015/03/02/obama-unveils-national-obamalaw-plan/