World Net Daily reports “Conservatives have been fighting Common Core national education standards for two years at the state level, but a massive bill steamrolling through Congress has the potential to cement some of the most despised elements of Common Core into federal law.
The re-authorization and rewriting of No Child Left Behind – also known as ESEA, or the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 – has been placed on a fast track in the House and Senate. It will chart the course of the federal role in education for years to come.
Conservative critics have lambasted No Child Left Behind as the main source of federal overreach into education while those on the left have also criticized it for punishing low-performing schools in disadvantaged areas. The law, combined with President Obama’s ESEA “waivers,” allowed states to get grants if they accepted federal rules and regulations. Both the original law and Obama’s waivers loaded up states with federal mandates and measured compliance through incessant testing and data-mining of students and teachers.
Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., is sponsoring the bill in the Senate, and Rep. John Kline, R-Minn., has a companion bill in the House. Both bills are extremely complex and lengthy. A draft bill in the Senate is nearly 400 pages, and the companion draft in the House is 597 pages long. By the time they are marked up as formal bills, each is expected to be over 1,000 pages.
They say both bills require collection of non-academic data such as students’ attitudes, values, dispositions and beliefs, in a “womb to workforce” tracking system mandated for any states that accept federal education dollars, which is all 50 states.
ESEA as currently written would allow tracking through the creation of a unique ID number for every student, teacher and principal, with data fed into longitudinal databases being set up in every state with federal grants.
The bills would also promote greater “choice” by converting most public schools to Title I disadvantaged schools and have education dollars follow the student, whether that student attends public school, a charter school, private or parochial school. How local, elected school boards increase control if large numbers of public-school students move into publicly funded charter schools run by unelected boards remains a mystery.
Also up for decision is whether to apply the federal ESEA rules to early education, meaning daycares and preschools. Data collection could then start basically at birth or shortly after. This is a policy advocated by professor James Heckman, the Nobel laureate economist at the University of Chicago.
Violating privacy of students and families
Hoge’s group is asking Alexander to stop the re-authorization of ESEA.
“This legislation violates federal law, the privacy of our children and families, our civil rights, and states’ rights,” she said.
She said parents have not been invited to testify at Alexander’s hearings.
“Parents demand new hearings and an investigation on the impact of this legislation,” a statement from Pennsylvania Against Common Core said.
“The Re-authorization of ESEA must be stopped because the provisions inherent in this legislation will nationalize education,” Hoge said. “Two years of the ESEA flexibility waiver have proven to the states that have accepted this waiver, exactly what the re-authorization will mean – total federal control of education; no state authority, and no local school board autonomy.”
The grants in each state create a national ID for every child, using data to monitor every child in the United States under Title I, Hoge said.
“Why hasn’t anyone testified to the fact that, in effect, the poverty guidelines, as now allowed, are being manipulated to include ALL children in the ESEA Flexibility Waiver, 2013, under the Title I blanket that mandates Common Core to every child.”
Read more HERE.
Related: NO WAY, ESEA! … TONIGHT, 2/6 Jeff Rense with Charlotte Iserbyt and Anita Hoge, click here.
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