More Radicals for Common Core: The Pro-Amnesty Contingent

Mary Grabar, Apr 18, 2013

This first appeared here and I would like to thank Mary for allowing me to publish her work.  RK

My antennae go up whenever any education initiative is associated with radicals, like Bill Ayers. We still don’t know why Bill Ayers was at an education conference with Arne Duncan and a representative from Achieve, the well-connected, Washington-based non-profit organizing this effort to nationalize education.

But once I began investigating the curricula and test questions I learned that sure enough, the rigorous “standards” turned out to be nothing more than efforts to impose a curriculum that will make global citizens out of all American students. Or the kind of curriculum Bill Ayers would like.

Now I learn via Tina Trent that an organization called NALEO (National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials), a pro-amnesty group, co-hosted an event in Los Angeles last month on Common Core.

The NALEO Newsletter announced “NALEO Educational Fund last month co-hosted a national kickoff on the common core state standards, in partnership with the Campaign for High School Equity (CHSE) in Los Angeles.”

They quoted the official line from the Department of Education: “The Common Core State Standards Initiative is a state-led, voluntary effort to establish a single set of educational standards for English-language, arts and mathematics that states can share and adopt. They are designed to ensure that students graduating from high school are prepared for college, employment and success in the global economy.”

Right.

The official propaganda continues: “State leaders, through their membership in the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA) Center, have developed a common core of state standards with the assistance of content specialists and education experts.” Common Core, of course, was passed without legislative approval and usually without legislative knowledge, as happened here in Georgia. That’s why Senator William Ligon introduced a bill to withdraw the state from Common Core standards.

So who are these “content specialists and education experts”? It turns out that they are usually radicals, like Bill Ayers’s “pal” Linda Darling-Hammond who is in charge of developing one of the two sets of the nationally administered tests.

The meeting sponsored by NALEO had the usual suspects, and not any traditional Core Knowledge Curriculum representatives in the tradition of E.D. Hirsch, who advocates learning about the literary classics and history: “The program in Los Angeles included local NALEO members and representatives from the NAACP, the National Indian Education Association (NIEA), the South East Asian Resource Asian Center (SEARAC), the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), the National Urban League, the Alliance for Excellent Education, the Leadership Conference on Civil & Human Rights and the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC).”

Trent, who opposed Georgia’s Hate Crimes bill more than a decade ago, says that these are many of the same radical groups who were pushing for hate crimes legislation. And as with the hate crimes law, non-profits are being empowered by the government to promote Common Core. “In the hate crimes model, non-elected non-profits were given vast powers to advise police and develop procedures for identifying and prosecuting so-called ‘hate,’” says Trent. “What we ended up with was the politicization of justice itself, and a handover of government powers to activist groups with an identity politics agenda.” She warns that Common Core is empowering the same activist groups through the federal educational bureaucracy--hardly a process in accord with our republican, representative form of government.

Common Core, it turns out, is just one more way, as she puts it, that we are “handing over government operations to politically driven non-profits.”

Pro-amnesty non-profit groups have been trying to indoctrinate school children about immigration for a long time now. They fought an Arizona law that prohibited teaching hatred towards certain ethnic groups (primarily white Americans), which a Mexican-American (“Raza studies”) studies curriculum did. Education professors have also been using their classrooms to lobby for amnesty. Common Core, the initiative of Obama’s Department of Education, may be the latest way they are trying to deny the sovereignty of the United States in students’ minds.

This information about NALEO and other groups is one more piece of evidence for opposing Common Core. Do we need any more?

For more information about Common Core, see my website, www.dissidentprof.com, where I have a section on Common Core and links to organizations that are fighting this unconstitutional takeover of education.