St. Tammany Parish May Reject Common Core Tonight

Terri Timmcke of 'Stop Common Core in Louisiana' discussed her coalition's opposition to the Common Core Standard on 'Mornings With Ken and Bernie' today.

According to Timmcke,

The Common Core Standards Initiative actually includes three distinct but very interactive ingredients:

• First we have the nationalized Common Core Standards that everybody seems to be talking about.
• The second part is nationalized assessment or testing that will test the students on what they know and not only will the students be graded on this but the teachers and schools also.
• The third portion of this once they get all the information from the testing it will all be loaded into what they calling a student longitudinal data base which is supposed to collect information on our kids from birth  into the work force.  So this is like the NSA for kids.

Timmcke said there are more intrusive areas of the Common Core Standard,

 On the Dept. of Education website you can see the agreement Louisiana had to sign with the testing consortium which for us is PARCC.  Actually they want to get personal information on our children.  What are their value systems?  What are their beliefs?  What are their religious affiliations?  Do you have guns in your house?  That sort of information will be put in a data base and kept forever on our children.  So it's really much bigger than a 'standard'.

There's yet another component to Common Core that is of concern.  Timmcke said,

The really scare part about the data base is that the Federal Dept. of Education under President Obama has changed our Federal Education rights and privacy laws for our children where it used to require that any personally identifiable information like that on our children could not be released without parental consent.  That requirement has been removed.  The second thing that they've done, is that they very narrowly limited who could have access to information on our children, now the Federal Dept. of Education has given themselves the authority to designate authorized agents which can be anyone.

 

Listen to the interview: