""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.""
""Talk about joint efforts between China, India, Russia and Iran against NATO expansion was augmented with plans for tripartite military talks between Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran.
Defense ministers and military officials from all over the world gathered on April 16 at the landmark Radisson Royal or Hotel Ukraina, one of the best pieces of Soviet architecture in Moscow, which is known as one of the “Seven Sisters” that were constructed during Joseph Stalin’s time. The two-day event hosted by the Russian Defense Ministry was the fourth annual Moscow Conference on International Security (MCIS).
Civilian and military officials from over seventy countries, including NATO members, attended. Fifteen defense ministers took part in the event. However, aside from Greece, defense ministers of NATO countries did not participate in the conference.
Unlike previous years, the MCIS organizers did not send Ukraine an invitation for 2015’s confab. According to Russian Deputy Defense Minister Anatoly Antonov, “At this stage of the brutal information antagonism in regard to the crisis in southeastern Ukraine, we decided not to inflame the situation at the conference and at this stage made the decision not to invite our Ukrainian colleagues to the event.”
On a personal note, as a matter of interest I have followed these types of conferences for years, because important statements about foreign and security policies tend to come out of them. This year I was keen for the inauguration of this particular security conference. Aside from it taking place at a time where the geopolitical landscape of the globe is rapidly shifting, I was interested to see what the conference would produce since I was asked in 2014 through the Russian Embassy in Canada if I was interested in attending the IV MCIS.
The rest of the world speaks: Hearing non-Euro-Atlantic security concerns
The Moscow conference is the Russian equivalent to the Munich Security Conference held at the Hotel Bayerischer Hof in Germany. There, however, are critical differences between the two events.
While the Munich Security Conference is established around Euro-Atlantic security and views global security from the ‘Atlanticist’ standpoint of NATO, the MCIS represents a much broader and diverse global perspective. It represents the rest of the non-Euro-Atlantic world’s security concerns, particularly the Middle East and Asia-Pacific. Ranging from Argentina, India, and Vietnam to Egypt and South Africa, the conference at the Hotel Ukraina brought a variety of big and small players to the table whose voices and security interests, in one way or another, are otherwise undermined and ignored in Munich by US and NATO leaders.
Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu, who holds the rank of a flag officer that is equal to that of a four-star general in most NATO countries, opened the conference. Also speaking and seated next to Shoigu were Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and other high-ranking officials. All of them addressed Washington’s multispectral warfare that has utilized color revolutions, like EuroMaidan in Ukraine and the Rose Revolution in Georgia, for regime change. Shoigu cited Venezuela and China’s Hong Kong Special Administrative Region as failed color revolutions.
Foreign Minister Lavrov reminded the attendees that the possibilities of a dangerous world conflict were increasing due to the lack of concern by the US and NATO for the security of others and a lack of constructive dialogue. When making his argument, Lavrov cited US President Franklin Roosevelt by saying, “There can be no middle ground here. We shall have to take the responsibility for world collaboration, or we shall have to bear the responsibility for another world conflict.” “I believe that they formulated one of the main lessons of the most devastating global conflict in history: it is only possible to meet common challenges and preserve the peace through collective, joint efforts based on respect for the legitimate interests of all partners,” he explained about what world leaders learned from the Second World War.
Shoigu had over ten bilateral meetings with the different defense ministers and chiefs who arrived in Moscow for the MCIS. During a meeting with the Serbian Defense Minister Bratislav Gasic, Shoigu said that Moscow considers Belgrade a reliable partner in military cooperation.
Chinese-Russian-Iranian coalition: Washington’s nightmare
The myth that Russia is internationally isolated was shot down again during the conference, which has also resulted in some important announcements.
Kazakhstani Defense Minister Imangali Tasmagambetov and Shoigu announced that the implementation for a joint Kazakhstani-Russian air defense system had begun. This is not only indicative of the integration of the air space of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, but part of a trend. It heralded other announcements against NATO’s missile defense shield.
The most vigorous statement though was that of Iranian Defense Minister Hussein Dehghan. Brigadier-General Deghan said that Iran wanted China, India, and Russia to stand together in jointly opposing the eastward expansion of NATO and the threat posed by the alliance’s missile shield project to their collective security.
During a meeting with Chinese Defense Minister Chang Wanquan, Shoigu emphasized that Moscow’s military ties with Beijing are its “overriding priority.” In another bilateral meeting the defense honchos of Iran and Russia confirmed that their cooperation will be part of the cornerstones of a new multipolar order and that Moscow and Tehran were in harmony in their strategic approach to the US.
After Dehghan and the Iranian delegation met with Shoigu and their Russian counterparts, it was announced that a tripartite summit may take place between Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran. The idea was later endorsed by the Chinese delegation.
The geopolitical environment is changing and it is not sympathetic to US interests. Not only has a Eurasian Economic Union been formed by Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Russia in the post-Soviet heart of Eurasia, but Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran — the Eurasian Triple Entente — have been in a long process of coming together politically, strategically, economically, diplomatically, and militarily.
Eurasian harmony and integration challenges the US position in its “Western perch” and bridgehead in Europe and even orients US allies to act more independently. This is one of the central themes explored by my book The Globalization of NATO.
Former US security bigwig Zbigniew Brzezinski warned US elites against the formation of a Eurasian “coalition that could eventually seek to challenge America’s primacy.” According to Brzezinski such a Eurasian alliance would arise as a “Chinese-Russian-Iranian coalition” with Beijing as its focal point.
“For Chinese strategists, confronting the trilateral coalition of America and Europe and Japan, the most effective geopolitical counter might well be to try and fashion a triple alliance of its own, linking China with Iran in the Persian Gulf/Middle East region and with Russia in the area of the former Soviet Union,” Brzezinski warns.
“In assessing China’s future options, one has to consider also the possibility that an economically successful and politically self-confident China — but one which feels excluded from the global system and which decides to become both the advocate and the leader of the deprived states of the world — may decide to pose not only an articulate doctrinal but also a powerful geopolitical challenge to the dominant trilateral world,” he explains.
More or less, this is the track that the Chinese are following. Minister Wanquan flatly told the MCIS that a fair world order was needed.
The threat for the US is that a Chinese-Russian-Iranian coalition could, in Brzezinski’s own words, “be a potent magnet for other states dissatisfied with the status quo.""
