Gates Foundation: Common Core Produces Career-Ready Citizens

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) have financed a study that claims K-12 teachers praise Common Core State Standards (CCSS) as the perfect way to improve students’ thinking skills.

Data for the study was provided by a national online survey conducted by the Harrison Group wherein 20,157 public school educators were questioned in July of this year.

There were 20,000 participants in the study that are educators. The study was published by Scholastic, Inc.

This study states that three-fourths of teachers believe that CCSS improves student’s ability to reason and think critically.

With the backing of the National Governors Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief School Officers (CCSS) was introduced in 2009 to states across the nation.

The NGA and CCSS collaborated with experts provided by the BMGF to create CCSS.

President Obama initiated billions of dollars in federal grant money to install CCSS into public schools to create “collage and career-ready standards ” of educating American youth.

Margery Mayer, president of education for Scholastic said: “I think that teachers see this as a moment of renewal. They like what the Common Core is asking them to do in the classroom.”

The School Improvement Network (SIN) conducted a survey of 3,077 teachers that claims 81% of CCSS will produce “an overall positive impact on student preparation toward college and career” while 79% of participants stated that CCSS has “become overly politicized and that they do not support efforts by political groups” to remove the standards from public schools.

BMGF published a document entitled, “Shifting into High Gear: Accelerating the Common Core through Teacher Networks” which creates “robust teacher networks to accelerate the impact of their efforts to support Common Core implementation.”

The College Ready Work (CRW) team is an off-shoot of the College Ready Strategy (CRS) provides “existing Foundation partners” to become “networks” for educators to ensure that CCSS is implemented “successfully”.

Last month, Maine Governor Paul LaPage signed an executive order (EO) reiterating that public schools in Maine are locally controlled that student’s personal information will not be shared with corporations and federal agencies.

The EO states that “the Department of Education shall not adopt any educational standards, curricula or instructional approaches that may be mandated by the federal government. That the Department of Education shall not apply for any federal grant that requires, as a condition of application, the adoption of any federally-developed standards, curricula or instructional approaches.”

CCSS is directed at teaching children to gauge their decision-making abilities on the whims of their emotional state by emphasizing personal analysis through consistent multiple-choice testing.

CCSS aspires to “have set new goals for student learning” and require “effective tools and resources to ensure students meet those goals.”

Under the CCSS, new standards of learning have been implemented with the expressed purpose of dumbing down the population. These include:

• Basic knowledge of the “classics” without a focus on reading comprehension• Reinvention of writing skill to focus on keyboard and typing skills for college and career readiness• Learning how to speak improperly by integrating slang and other alternative modes of communication• Using media as a form of learning to train students to become dependent on mainstream media for their information while de-emphasizing personal research and independent thought• Replacing cursive writing with courses on keyboard and focus on improving typing skills• Replacing cognitive thought facilitated by mathematics with the broad belief system that illegitimates logic and reasoning

Pennsylvania approved CCSS in 2010; however concerns caused parents to question whether or not there would be national statewide testing, new reading lists and data collection made on students attending public schools.

State House Representative Seth Grove asserted that “the community is screaming that we need career-ready kids.”

Teachers in Idaho will be using approved “strategy cards” to teach students how to drill for a math quiz. The idea is that students will be inspired to find the answer, rather than show children how to work through a math equation.

Memorization is the center of this new way of educating children with a focus on visualization to understand relationships between numbers. This is a technique that supposes the child will eventually come to the correct answer to the question.

By using deduction, the CCSS standard is part of the uniform “what every child should know curriculum.”

The US Armed Forces applaud CCSS ability to produce automatons as recruits to the military; however the reality is that because of CCSS, there is a 30% increase in new recruits who cannot pass the entry exam.

This is an issue in Tennessee where military families are concerned that the next generation will not be able to function within the military.

The GI Bill and educational subsidies may become obsolete should new recruits not need to learn, but rather acquire a skill.

CCSS emphasizes “skill that military leaders value and need in our servicemen and women”; however the trade-off are generations that cannot think for themselves, cannot reason independently and are lacking the ability to perform simple tasks such as structuring a sentence.