faithistheword

This article appeared in Monday's Detroit News, by State Rep. Tom McMillen, R-Rochester Hills.
A new Lobbying group, called "Conservatives for higher standards" (CHS) which includes former Michigan Governor, John Engler, has launched a media blitz to push its view of education reform. Presumably, a group that endorses higher standards would advocate that Michigan upgrade its K-12 standards to equal the best in the Nation, such as those previously in place in Massachusetts or Indiana. The Thomas B. Fordham Institute lauded those states' standards as first-rate.
But CHS is pushing instead a set of standards that Fordham ranks as inferior to those states'--the new Common Core national standards. (Although Massachusetts and Indiana have yielded to the Common Core juggernaut and jettisoned their high standards, Indiana is now re-thinking that rush decision.) And one of the CHS partners advocating the inferior Common Core standards is Fordham. What's going on here?
What's going on is that CHS (a partnership of Fordham and Jeb Bush's Foundation for Excellence in Education) is doing what its member groups have been paid to do--lobby for the Common Core standards. Paid by Whom? Primarily by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which it has decided it should be allowed to conduct its grand education experiment on American children because of Gates's superior wealth and intellect. But the goals of Gates and the other private corporate entities that are pushing Common Core don't necessarily correlate to what parents want for their children.
The Common Core standards were created by two private trade associations, the National Governors Association, and the Council of Chief State School Officers, financed largely by Gates, and imposed on states with the lure of federal grants. Common Core creates a system of top-down education control designed to give students the minimum amount of education they need for community college or an entry-level job. The idea is to develop workers for the managed economy, not to educate citizens. Thus, companies like Microsoft would have access to entry-level workers they wouldn't have to train. The added benefit would be a reduced likelihood of developing independent-minded future competitors of these powerful companies. It's 17th century mercantilism with a modern
twist.
A chief drafter of the Common Core math standards , Jason Zimba, has admitted that Common Core prepares students for a non-selective community college, not a four-year university. Dr. James Milgram of Stanford University
the Common Core Validation Committee's only mathematician, rejected the standards because he concluded that they would leave American students at least two years behind their counterparts in the highest-achieving nations by 8th grade.