Do Not Allow The Education Reform Corporatists To Play Their "Divide And Conquer" Strategies Against Common Core Opponents

There's a steady barrage of attacks against the Common Core coming from the right these days.

Just this week we have Michelle Malkin's take-down of Tony Bennett and Jeb Bush at Townhall, a critique of the Common Core at Rupert Murdoch's FOX News, an attack on the data-mining components to the Core at the American Thinker, Tea Partiers in Ohio looking to repeal the standards in the state, Tea Partiers and conservative rank and file giving it to Common Core shill/Idaho governor Tom Luna, and a small group of Tea Partiers protesting Governor Scott Walker's support of the Common Core in Wisconsin.

The Obama administration, the neoliberals in the Democratic establishment and the hedge fundies at the Democrats For Education Reform are worried that progressive critics of corporate education reform might join with these Tea Party and conservative opponents to the Core to drive a stake through the heart of the standards implementation movement.

As such, they're using a "divide and conquer" strategy to try and remind progressive opponents to corporate education reform just how much they do not have in common with these conservative Common Core opponents.

It's a classic strategy that's been used for ages in America to divide people with common interests by exploiting issues of race and religion.

Buried in a May 2013 Education Week article about how Common Core proponents are fighting back against the Core backlash was the blueprint for the "divide and conquer" strategy:

Stand for Children Indiana, a pro-common-core group, which supports broad early-education opportunities and charter schools, released two different 30-second TV advertisements, one on March 5 and another on April 16, defending the standards. The campaign also included radio spots.

A spokesman for the group, Jay Kenworthy, declined to disclose how much it spent on the ads and said it hadn't decided whether to renew the public relations push when common-core hearings get underway in Indiana this summer. 

That state is also ground zero for a pro-common-core argument aimed at a liberal audience: that many of the loudest common-core opponents hold other political views that the audience would find abhorrent.

For example, Larry Grau, the director of the Indiana affiliate of Democrats for Education Reform, or DFER, wrote on the group's blog April 23 that GOP Sen. Scott Schneider wants schools to teach creationism and has sought to make enforcement of President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act a felony. DFER Indiana has also used language that warned about "bedfellows" in the anti-common-core movement that could cause someone to say, "I hate myself for this in the morning." Mr. Grau said he wanted the group's rhetoric to be "a little edgy."

He argued that Democrats suspicious of other policy proposals, like vouchers, should not let those views lead them to lash out at the common core. "They're not thinking before they're saying who they're partnering with on the common core," Mr. Grau said in an interview.

Common Core proponents know that they have lost the Tea Party/conservative base on Common Core. 

The Common Core support of Jeb Bush, Chris Christie and Mitch Daniels is not keeping the Tea Party people from taking to the streets after listening to Glenn Beck rail about the Core on the radio and reading Michelle Malkin rail against it in the blogosphere and protest the Common Core implementation.

In state after state, you're seeing these Tea Party protests that have been very effective in either sidetracking Common Core implementation (Indiana, Michigan) or setting up a battle between Core proponents and opponents that might lead to a sidetrack in the future (Ohio, Idaho.)

That's got Common Core proponents, especially the Republican ones, very worried.

But so long as Common Core Democratic proponents can keep the teachers unions on board, can keep most progressives either happy with the Core or agnostic at best, the Core just might survive in states without large Tea Party elements.

That's where the "divide and conquer" strategy comes.

They're telling progressives, hey, you can't join with Glenn Beck or Michelle Malkin or Tea Party people to oppose Common Core - these people are creationists and anti-abortion advocates, they believe the world was made in seven days for Chrissakes!  You've seen "Inherit The Wind" - you know what we're dealing with here.

I have seen this critique come from some teachers in the education blogosphere as well.

But the truth is, much of the critique of the Core coming from the right is accurate and fair and as unwingnutty as you can get.

For example, here's Michelle Malkin yesterday on Jeb Bush and Tony Bennett:

These good ol' boys bonded over their zeal for the top-down racket known as Common Core. As I've reported previously, this Fed Ed program is supported by both big-business interests (Microsoft founder Bill Gates and News Corp. founder Rupert Murdoch's education arm) and government educrats. Progressive activists in both parties have worked on nationalized standards, tests and curriculum for decades under previous names: outcome-based education, national school-to-work, Goals 2000 and No Child Left Behind, for example. Obama administration bribery through "Race To The Top" greased the wheels for adoption of the Common Core program by cash-strapped states, many of which had more rigorous standards than the fed-imposed system.

Common Core cheerleaders falsely claimed that untested standards were "internationally benchmarked." Math and English standards have been dumbed down. And a plethora of data-mining firms stand to gain billions from student information gathered under the Common Core assessments umbrella. The Obama administration's sabotage of federal educational privacy protections will help supply that data to the highest crony bidders.

After Bennett was voted out of office in Indiana last fall over his efforts to ram the phony "standards" and nationalized testing scheme through, Team Jeb came to the rescue. In addition to greasing the wheels for the Florida schools chief job, Bush's foundation named Bennett one of its "Chiefs for Change." That group champions Common Core, and many of its members are part of a behemoth, federally funded testing consortium called PARCC (the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers), which raked in $186 million through Race To The Top to develop nationalized tests "aligned" to the top-down Common Core program.

Bush's foundation has now joined with the Common Core-peddling Fordham Institute under a new phony-baloney umbrella group: "Conservatives for Higher Standards." While its list of supporters includes federal bureaucrats, politicians and business interests, there are no grassroots conservative parents or teacher groups. So beware of this "conservative" front. And remember: Astro-turfing runs in the Bush family. Under George W. Bush, the federal Department of Education paid GOP mouthpiece/columnist Armstrong Williams to shill for No Child Left Behind.

Heather Crossin, a conservative Indiana mom who helped spearhead the drive to eject Bennett from office and reject Common Core in her state, put it best. She told me after the latest crony Republican education scandal this week:

"This situation illustrates why it is crucial that parents be reinserted into the decision-making process when it comes to the education of their children. When their voices and concerns take a backseat to 'command and control' approaches to ed reform, the public trust can easily be broken." It's elementary.

And the critique of Common Core at the American Thinker:

Although high information Americans are becoming aware of the federal takeover of education through Common Core Standards, there seems to be little recognition yet that Common Core gives schools and third parties unprecedented access to students' personal information.  The federal government is acquiring a massive amount of data that can be sold to the highest bidders. This is an invasion of student and family privacy and a violation of our 4th Amendment rights
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While many Americans are focused on NSA and other such "phony scandals," the Washington education police are swarming around in schools gathering intimate data on children and families.

The education technology buzzards are circling overhead and, having smelled the strong scent of money, are salivating at the thought of making billions from this new goldmine.

 Reuters reported that in 2012 technology startups for the K-12 market attracted more than $425 million in venture capital.  Rupert Murdoch, owner of Amplify Education, one of the country's largest education technology companies, estimates that K-12 education is a $500 billion sector in the U.S. alone.


Although the federal government was prohibited legally from gathering student specific data for a national database, the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act -- "Stimulus Bill" -- provided a loophole.  Money from the ARRA was given to each of the states to develop longitudinal data systems to catalog data generated by Common Core aligned tests.

The deal was sweetened and guaranteed state compliance when the Obama administration used data system development as the key criterion for awarding additional K-12 funds through the "Race to the Top" program.


In 2011the U.S. Department of Education reinterpreted the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act to permit a student's academic record to be shared with virtually anyone including non-governmental organizations without prior written parental consent!


Education technology companies can use the information to develop software for students, teachers, and administrators.


Beginning with the 2014-2015 school year, students in states that have accepted Common Core standards will begin taking state standardized tests that are aligned with the Common Core learning standards.


The state tests will glean student-specific data to be stored by the states in their new longitudinal data systems that are designed to track a student from pre-school through college and even further.

The National Center for Education Statistics, which is part of the USDOE, helps states to identify and code the various types of information.


The range of data that can be collected includes hobbies, psychological evaluations, medical records, religious affiliation, political affiliation, family income, behavioral problems, disciplinary history, career goals, addresses, and bus stop times and locations. 


Research Fellow Joy Pullmann at the Heartland Institute said the February 2013 report by the USDOE, "Promoting Grit, Tenacity, and Perseverance," p. 44, reveals that Common Core's data mining includes "...using cameras to judge facial expressions, an electronic seat that judges posture, a pressure-sensitive computer mouse and a biometric wrap on kids' wrists."


Under Arne Duncan, President Obama's Secretary of Education, there is an unprecedented level of opportunity for private influence on education.  Thus public-private partnerships are flourishing.

Exxon Mobil Corporation used television coverage of the Masters Golf Tournament to blitz ads promoting Common Core.  Bill Gates has spent millions of dollars to develop, support, and fund the establishment of Common Core standards and testing in U.S. public schools.


In fact, a massive $100 million public school database spearheaded by funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been developed to share student information with private companies -- such as Gates' Microsoft -- that sell educational products and services so they can mine the information to create new tailored products.  


Strange new alliances have emerged from this project, with the likes of the liberal Gates Foundation which provided most of the funding and Amplify Education, a division of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, which developed the database system.  The partnership then turned it over to a nonprofit corporation called inBloom to operate and control the information.


The inBloom website states that security of the stored student data cannot be guaranteed:

"While in this day and age no security protections can be 100% guaranteed, inBloom has greatly improved student data protection beyond the measures currently used by most school systems."

This admission that security of student files cannot be guaranteed has the public riled up. Parents from Louisiana and New York have written state officials in protest, as have the Massachusetts chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union and Parent Teacher Association.  A growing number of Republican lawmakers nationwide have expressed concern about Common Core data mining and are considering introducing legislation to stop the sharing of student data with outside groups.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington is suing the USDOE in an effort to stop the illegal collection, storage, and sharing of student data.  President and executive director Marc Rotenberg said that, "Once the data gets out there it has all sorts of ramifications. It weakens the [FERPA] structure Congress put in place because Congress understands that a lot of student data can be stigmatizing, keeping people out of jobs, for example."


ParentalRights.org President Michael P. Farris maintains that personal privacy is being destroyed by those who want to track children. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child has browbeaten nations to create a national database so that the government can track children, purportedly to protect their human rights.


Touting this centralized database system as a method to personalize student education is a naïve notion by the tech industry, which evidently thinks the massive problems of public education can be fixed with a bit of slick technical engineering.

Sure, the writer gets a little wingnutty at the end by calling this a program of the Marxist Obama government - it's actually a program of the corporatist Obama government. 

And I think the writer is wrong when she calls the NSA data mining a "phony scandal" -  it's actually connected to the very student data mining movement she's writing about. 

Indeed, Microsoft is a player in each of these data mining movements by the government.

But really, other than that, the writer provides a solid argument for why Common Core should be opposed - because it is being used by the federal government, in concert with corporations, to gather, mine and exploit student data for their own ends.

And Malkin connects all the right dots on how Common Core came about and who stands to profit from it.

There is much that I agree with in these critiques of Common Core coming from the right.  Rather than focus on the things I do not agree with these people on, I prefer to emphasize the points we do agree on and use this as a base to build widespread support against the corporatist takeover of the public education system.

As I wrote in an earlier post about this very issue:

I, for one, am happy to work with people on the right against the Common Core.

I like to use Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul as my model for that kind of work.

Sure Kucinich and Paul might not have agreed on a lot of different policies, but there were some core ones they agreed upon, including opposition to the Surveillance State, opposition to overseas wars and the need to add some transparency to the Federal Reserve.

Those men worked together on those issues, even if on other issues they were as far apart as the sun and the moon.

Progressive and Tea Partiers can work similarly against Common Core.

Yes, the two sides may oppose Common Core for different reasons.

But the important thing is, both sides oppose this federal curriculum and are fighting to repeal it in state after state after state all across the nation. 

Beware people on the left telling you that you can't work with Tea Partiers or conservatives to oppose Common Core because of the fundamental differences you may have on other issues.

That's a "divide and conquer" strategy emanating from the education reform establishment these days to try and save the Core from what is starting to look like its imminent demise as state after state looks to drop out of the Common Core and the assessment consortia associated with the standards.