A sensible guide for parents written by a teacher who was initially for Common Core and learned the truth. Learn the importance of opting your child out of SBAC testing.

The issuance to students of IDs that connect them to their test scores is critical to the overall success of the federal government's Common Core educational program, according to a study. Among the "   ... read more

Do you want your child to be Bill Gates' "guinea pig" for 10 years to determine if Common Core works or not' Please watch the video in this article and listen to what one of the primary forces behind C   ... read more

Don't say you weren't warned. In March of this year, the Harvard Graduate School of Education hosted an event titled "Common Core: Perils, Pitfalls, and Opportunities." It was moderated by Harvard p   ... read more

One of the sticky issues regarding the Common Core remains the secretive way the standards were first written, and the almost total absence of classroom educators from that process -- which I first pointed o   ... read more

It took a teacher 56 seconds to explain how to add 9 plus 6. “When you and I were in school, we used to just memorize 9 plus 6 equals 15. Not anymore. With the Common Core, students need to understand w   ... read more

A study published by the pro-Common Core Carnegie Corporation in 2013 generated a key finding that has not received much attention, but perhaps should be quoted often at education hearings in state legislatures a   ... read more

This study, touting "new" designs for education, actually reveals some little heard problems with Common Core.

How did I miss it? The single most important study on Common Core implementation was published by the Carnegie Corporation in 2013, but its key finding has been ignored.

There are genuine problems with Common Core all the same, and these are potentially at a deeper level. Take as one example, the Common Core kindergarten mathematics standard, which requires that children u   ... read more

Last Saturday Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal told Caffeinated Thoughts that he believed he had the authority and power to get out of Common Core and that he was going to use that power. This afternoon d   ... read more

Under a new program implemented by education czar Arne Duncan, employees from the federal department of education will be placed in schools throughout the nation to oversee their operations and ensure t   ... read more

A new study released by the Boston-based Pioneer Institute finds that new technology development that has been encouraged through the use of federal grants has served to threaten children’s privacy by a   ... read more

Parents across California are learning more about the Common Core standards, as grass roots groups opposed to the centralized standards from across the state have joined together for a whirlwind tour f   ... read more

Common Core is on the ropes. More and more states are pulling back from the national standards as the 2014–15 school year implementation deadline looms near. In Louisiana, Governor Bobby Jindal (R)—formerly a   ... read more

The question posed re: whether education is about "my child" or about the "the system", is the wrong question. The question should be, "Should schools exist to educate or to train'" There's a fundamental d   ... read more

As the Obama administration, Bill Gates, the United Nations, and other forces seek to finalize the decades-old effort to nationalize - and even globalize - education by bribing and bludgeoning state governments t   ... read more

Between March 25 and June 6, more than 4 million kids will sit for the trial run of national Common Core tests. Faced with a rise in parents who don’t want their kids taking these tests, state officials a   ... read more

Despite the new law supposedly aimed at stopping Common Core in Indiana, though, suspicion and outrage is still building as Hoosiers learn about the supposedly “new and improved” standards. According t   ... read more

We know from our friends at Knewton what the Grand Design is-- a system in which student progress is mapped down to the atomic level. Atomic level (a term that Knewton lervs deeply) means test by test, a   ... read more

WASHINGTON, D.C. – For far too long a big part of the Common Core debate has been about establishing simple fact: the federal government provided serious coercion to get states to adopt the Core, and t   ... read more

Tina Jung, information officer for the California Department of Education, said the adoption of the Common Core is not mandatory. She said it is up to the local school districts, not the state, to decide i   ... read more

Dr. Gary Johnson is the Director of Special Education Advocacy and Instruction, at the Early Life Child Psychology and Education Center in Utah. His testimony before the Wisconsin State Legislature is s   ... read more

Behind the scenes of standardized testing. After three years working as a scorer, Dan DiMaggio says he's a skimming machine. "It's ugly," he says. "You just go as fast as possible."

Many parents object that Common Core will operate through computers that will collect private and personal information about students and their families. Teachers complain they are being forced to teach a   ... read more

With uncommon speed, school districts and charter schools this fall will receive substantial money they didn't foresee coming their way a few months ago to prepare for the Common Core standards. The catch: T   ... read more

The NSA isn’t the only one collecting data. A private national database, funded mostly by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, could collect wide-ranging records on millions of public school students. S   ... read more

While the common core may not be an issue for you, or your school, do know that for others it will be a major issue. And the problem is this, while the standards might work for you and your school, there a   ... read more

The Michigan Legislature is poised to pass a budget that prohibits the state education department from spending funds to implement the Common Core State Standards.

The move toward standards that teach students to be analytical encounters a bipartisan backlash. The passage for the seventh-grade lesson was blatantly offensive - an excerpt from a 1938 anti-Semitic c   ... read more

California signed on to new curriculum standards under pressure. But will they help' California failed to win a Race to the Top grant, but nonetheless committed itself to a new set of curriculum standards t   ... read more

The president’s proposal, called Preschool For All, would make another $20.9 million available to California for home-visiting programs. The programs send nurses, social workers or other professionals t   ... read more

Educators from the US and beyond: please share your teaching stories with Mr. Bill Gates. How have their policies influenced your classroom, your students, your teaching, your schools, and your communities?

Forget that curriculum experts hardly all agree with this assertion. Then, it says that the standards were "developed by states" when, in fact, they were not: the National Governors Association and Council o   ... read more

Indeed, the first wave of exams was so overwhelming for these young New Yorkers that some parents refused to let their children take the test.

Privacy concerns are growing among parents, educators and some state officials about a Gates Foundation-funded project that is storing an unprecedented amount of personal information about millions of s   ... read more

The Texas House of Representatives voted 140-2 to pass language prohibiting Texas from participating in the Common Core State Standards. Only two votes against it. Incredible. The bill, HB 462, was s   ... read more

But behind the high-profile back and forth over specific policies and prescriptions lies a story that has less to do with ideas than with money, less to do with facts than with an ideological subtext t   ... read more

Common Core State Standards are nothing without the tests/assessments. The proponents speak to how great the standards are but usually know little or nothing about the tests that are "being developed".    ... read more

Joy Pullmann at School Reform News wrote an excellent piece that helps to further demonstrate that the Common Core State Standards were not state-led. While there were many people who served on various c   ... read more

A Michigan state senator, Republican Tom McMillan, joined lawmakers across the country trying to stop the new academic standards when he successfully added language to the state budget last week that d   ... read more

Little known to the public are changes in the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act in 2011 by the Education Department. The changes allow for the release of student records for non-academic purposes. P   ... read more

Crayola joins the list of big name education companies who have sold out our children and America to the United Nations' global agenda.

inBloom, the non-profit started with a hundred million dollar investment from the Gates Foundation, is planning to create a digital record which, barring catastrophe, truly could be a permanent record o   ... read more

The problem they have is that the substance of the Tea Party criticism of Common Core standards is solid. And it aligns pretty well with what many of us a bit more to the left have been saying for years. L   ... read more

Instead of dealing with the real problem, the Common Core offers us, in the words of Common Core opponent Susan Ohanian, "a radical untried curriculum overhaul and ... nonstop national testing."

CSCOPE, a controversial school curriculum management system in Texas that once included a description of the Boston Tea Party as an act of terror and has called Islamic terrorists freedom fighters, is w   ... read more

Sadly, but not surprisingly, instead of improving education by repealing No Child Left Behind's testing and other mandates, the Obama administration is increasing national control over schools via the "   ... read more

We must fix the failures of No Child Left Behind. We must provide the funding we were promised, give our states the resources they need and finally meet our commitment to special education. We also need t   ... read more

The backlash is richly deserved. The Common Core standards are academically inferior to the standards they replaced in high performing states; and they ignore empirical lessons of how states like Massachusetts a   ... read more

All but four states have adopted the complete Common Core Standards. Those four states- Texas, Virginia, Alaska, and Nebraska - have been slow to warm to the uniform, but divisive, national standards f   ... read more

Students, parents, and teachers who are anxious or merely curious about the coming online assessments matched to the Common Core State Standards will now have the opportunity to go through a test run o   ... read more

Common Core recycles a decades-old, top-down approach to education. Its roots are in a letter sent to Hillary Clinton by Marc Tucker, president of the National Center on Education and the Economy, after B   ... read more

LANSING -- Hours after a conference committee approved a measure prohibiting the Michigan Department of Education from spending funds on implementing national Common Core State Standards for mathematics a   ... read more

The board's concerns revolved around the pending Common Core State Standards, which are national standards for math and language arts adopted by Oregon and 47 other states. During the public comment t   ... read more

The nation's eyes are on Indiana as it reconsiders the Common Core academic standards that are supposed to raise student achievement and standardize what children learn across the country. The operative w   ... read more

Between the two sides of the Common Core debate, proponents of Common Core have consistently failed the first test of any new government program -- follow the money.

But as the common core shifts from theory to reality, critics are emerging. State lawmakers are concerned about the cost, which the Fordham Institute estimated could run as high as $12 billion nationally. P   ... read more

Tea party groups over the past few weeks have suddenly and successfully pressured Republican governors to reassess their support for a rare bipartisan initiative backed by President Obama to overhaul t   ... read more

(Reuters) - A $100 million database set up to store extensive records on millions of public school students has stumbled badly since its launch this spring, with officials in several states backing away f   ... read more