I feel sorry for school guidance counselors. There’s a document out called “Role of the School Counselor in Utah Core” that says:

“You [the guidance counselors] are often the first line of defense in honoring the validity of the Utah Core State Standards.”

How many school counselors do you think became counselors so that they could serve (without pay) as marketing agents for the Gates-Pearson-Duncan power machine? I wonder if any school counselors are asking the state school board or their local superintendents on WHAT grounds they should honor the Core’s supposed validity. –Or is even the asking now seen as being insubordinate?

School counselors are supposed to “honor” the validity of UNVALID standards.

Does anything about this seem right to you?

VALID?

Doesn’t the word “valid” imply passing a validity test?

Common Core is both academically and politically invalid.

It’s 100% untried, experimental, and was rejected by its key validation committee members. It has a governance system over states that is contrary to the Constitutional way.

Surely at least some of the school counselors know these things.

The document quotes Jeb Bush: “The Common Core State Standards are an example of states recognizing a problem, then working together, sharing what works and what doesn’t.”

JEB BUSH.

Yikes. Jeb Bush, of all people, is not about to tell the truth about Common Core. Jeb Bush is funded by the very “philanthropist” who funded the entire Common Core and all its marketing, the one and only Bill Gates. Jeb Bush as a neutral, trustworthy source? Not even close!

But his statement is a lie even if it wasn’t coming from a Gates-bought man. Because Common Core is not, and never has been, an example of states “working together”. States didn’t ever “share what works and what doesn’t” to create the Core. That never happened, no matter how many times proponents claim that it did.

It was a group of D.C. businessmen that created the Common Core Standards without input from any Utah representatives nor Utah educators. There’s nothing state-led about it!

Nor did any state (or anyone) ever test these experimental standards. Ever.

This document for school counselors fails to mention, too, that no state has been given any authority by the Common Core Initiative to “work together” in the future, either, to amend or ever ALTER these commonly-held, supposedly states-controlled standards.

In truth, only the D.C. businessmen who created the standards can alter them because the standards are bound under copyright by D.C. businessmen. And they’re not accountable to voters.

So where’s the voice of the people in all of this?

School counselors are being pressured to believe and repeat actual falsehoods to students and parents.

INTERNATIONALLY BENCHMARKED?

Guidance counselors are told in the document that the standards are internationally benchmarked, which is another lie. As Dr. Stotsky has explained, “we are regularly told that Common Core’s standards are internationally benchmarked. Joel Klein, former head of the New York City schools, most recently repeated this myth in an interview with Paul Gigot, the Wall Street Journal editor… Not mentioned at all… is Klein’s current position in a company that does a lot of business with Common Core. An Exxon ad, repeated multiple times during a recently televised national tennis match, also suggested that Common Core’s standards were internationally benchmarked. We don’t know who influenced Exxon’s education director. Gigot never asked Klein what countries we were supposedly benchmarked to. Nor did the Exxon ad name a country to which these standards were supposedly benchmarked. Klein wouldn’t have been able to answer, nor could Exxon have named a country because Common Core’s standards are not internationally benchmarked.“

On what planet are the Common Core standards in fact internationally benchmarked?

STATE-LED? NO FEDERAL ROLE?

According to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, “In March of 2009, President Obama called on the nation’s governors and state school chiefs to develop standards and assessments”.

So the President claims he thought up Common Core.

But school guidance counselors are reading that “The Federal Government played NO role in the development of the Common Core State Standards.”

Confusing? Not really.

There are unarguable proofs to rebut the “no-federal-control-of-standards” claim.

There’s a federal cap of 15% on Common Core in the ESEA flexibility document, meaning that the federal government is telling states that they can’t add more than 15% to their standards if they’ve accepted Common Core.

There’s a federal review of Common Core tests.

Obama claimed he asked American governors to create common standards.

Duncan and Obama advocate for Common Core as they alter the meaning of the term “college and career ready standards,” –(click on it)– the term is now officially redefined on the federal website as being standards “COMMON TO A SIGNIFICANT NUMBER OF STATES” –on the ed.gov website!

Duncan promised that he and Obama would enlarge the federal role in education. He announced in a speech to UNESCO, “Traditionally [Constitutionally] the federal government in the U.S. has had a limited role in education policy… The Obama administration has sought to fundamentally shift the federal role, so that the Department is doing much more“. Clearly, Duncan and Obama have unconstitutional aims in controlling states’ educational systems. They are not hiding their aims very well.

There is also the top-heavy federal controls mandated for beneficiaries of the Common Core test grant called “Race to the Top for the Assessments” for (SBAC and PARCC testing consortia members.)

There is also the outrageous, official Department of Education partnership with the unelected D.C. club (CCSSO) that wrote and copyrighted the Common Core Standards –as well writing the Common DATA standards. Then we have the federal carrot of money going directly from the federal Department of Education to individual DISTRICTS that accept Common Core. Next there are federal reviews of Common Core tests. And there is federal data collection by federally partnered EIMAC/CCSSO and the federal EDFACTS data exchange, of information gathered by Common Core tests. And don’t forget President Obama’s Blueprint for Reform, which includes STANDARDS as well as data collection and teacher controls and more.

This lie is repeated, as counselors are told in the document’s “helpful talking points” section, that Common Core was a state-led effort “spearheaded by governors and state school chiefs” –assuming counselors (and all of us) are too stupid to realize that governors and school chiefs have ZERO authority over creation of unconstitutional, national education standards and do not represent voters on a national stage.

So on what planet is it a true statement that there is no federal role in the Common Core?

NO HARM TO CLASSIC LITERATURE?

The next “myth” that the document addresses is “the standards do not limit reading to non-fiction but promote a balance between literature and non-fiction works”.

The fact is that Common Core standards will drive the Common Core aligned tests and thus will drive the teaching.

Common Core standards do reduce the amount of classic literature that a student may be exposed to, and that limitation level increases gradually so that by the time a student is in high school, only a small percentage of his/her reading may be literature; most of it must be informational text, the types of nonfiction reading assignments that used to be given in history, science, journalism, or health classes. Now it’s invaded the sacred territory of the English classroom, to the marginalization of stories, and in my view, also to the detriment of the love of reading.

The English professor who served on the Comm