Tag Archives: Common Core

Common Core Presentation in Jacksonville, NC

Confused about Common Core?

 

Don’t know what Common Core is?

 

Or maybe you just have questions about the, the bad and the ugly about

 

Common Core and your child’s education?

 

Then come meet the experts.

 

Join us at an open forum on

 

November 12th at First Freewill Baptist Church

 

at

 

919 Gum Branch Road in Jacksonville.

 

The time is 7:00pm

 

This is NOT a script put out by the North Carolina or

 

Onslow County Boards of Education.

 

These are the FACTS about Common Core presented by

 

Lindalyn Kakadelis, Director of the North Carolina Education Alliance

 

with the John Locke Foundation; and

 

Jane Robbins, Senior Fellow with the American Principles Project

 

and renowned Common Core expert

 

 

 

This event is sponsored by concerned parents and grandparents of Onslow County

Common Core Presentation by Coastal Carolina Taxpayers Association

Public Service Announcement

October 28, 2013

 

Kim Fink, Common Core Committee Chairman for Coastal Carolina Taxpayers Association (CCTA), recently made a 5 minute speech to the Craven County Board of Education on behalf of CCTA. Kim packed an enormous amount of information into 5 minutes, and says she was able to do it by “talking fast and not breathing.” Kim’s talk is reprinted here…

 

 

My name is Kim Fink, and I am representing Coastal Carolina Taxpayers Association and I am the committee chair investigating Common Core.

 

We are fundamentally opposed to Common Core Standards.

Our reasons include:

It’s not legal; Congress has passed three separate statutes that prohibit the Department of education from supervising, directing or controlling curriculum. By using the CC standards and the associated national testing to define the curriculum, they are violating all 3 statutes.

Inception of Common Core: In 2009, the Secy. Of Education, Arnie Duncan gave the Dept. of Education 435 billion dollars of stimulus money that was used to fund the Race to the Top competition. Another incentive to the states was a waiver from the No Child Left Behind program.   To compete for this grant money, states had to agree to adopt Common Core, sight unseen. How did this happen? The application for the grants was released in November of 2009. Completed applications were due in 2 months, January of 2010. I remind you that at this time our state was desperate for money for education. Our legislators were not in session during November and December so the decision to apply for the grant was made by the Governor and state board of education. The standards were released in March of 2010, 2 months AFTER applying for the grant. Kind of reminds me of Obamacare, you had to pass it in order to see what was in it.   In June of 2010 the final draft of the Common Core Standards was released and the school board had until August for their final vote, NC state board of education voted unanimously on June 2, 2010 to adopt Common Core. This decision was made during summer vacation with little involvement from local districts, principals, teachers or parents. According to the John Locke Foundation, there was only one NC participant in developing Common Core, Professor Jere Confrey of the NC State University College of education.   These standards were adopted statewide without being field tested. There is no evidence to suggested that Common Core Standards are successful

 

Standards versus curriculum argument:   Proponents say the CC standards are not the curriculum; the states are free to change the curriculum. This is misleading as the standards drive the curriculum. The curriculum is merely the details of teaching the standards. The National tests will align with the standards, which will dictate the curriculum so students will be able to pass the tests.   When states sign on to CC they have agreed to the standards plus assessments, those tests will be the enforcement mechanism. David Coleman is the primary author of the English Language Arts portion of the Common Core, and is also the new President of the College board. He wants to align the SATs with CC; again this will assure the implementation of the CC curriculum.

Data Collection: When the NC agreed to Common Core, they agreed to aggressive online data collection of the students as well as the teachers. The Common Education Data Analysis and Reporting System(CEDARS) is the states longitudinal data system that incorporates the financial systems, teacher licensure, federally required data reporting, and student information from Power School, testing data and student transcripts. Included is personal information like test scores, disciplinary records, health history, medications, immunizations, student vehicle descriptions, family income range, religious affiliation, attitudes persistence, political affiliation etc. Allot of non-academic things that parents are not comfortable with, and have not given permission to share with anyone else, thanks to a presidential executive order allowing the data to be shared with any entity, public or private as long as it describes the sharing as necessary to an audit or evaluation of a federal program. This is from the amended regulations of “Family education rights in privacy act”

 

Why was CC adopted without being field tested, why weren’t other testing standards looked at? I think the answer is the money.   We all want what is best for our children. North Carolina is a Local Control State, which means the local school board is the FINAL authority on decisions of our County. We can’t choose the state tests, but we can choose to adopt whatever standards we want, and directly per Ms Alexis Schauss of the NC Board of Education, we will not lose access to State or Federal Funding should we choose a curriculum and standards other than Common Core, but may lose the Race to the Top grants. I strongly urge you to consider other non-nationalized options.

Why ccta cares: A major concern is how we are going to pay for the continued implementation of CC, the required infrastructure, the computers, the testing, textbooks and materials, the training/retraining of teachers and administration. The tax payer cost has been estimated to be between $300 million and $525 million over the next 7 years.

We care about the loss of parental rights, loss of input from teachers, principals, local and state school boards.   CCTA is more comfortable with Craven county school officials than we are with the state and federal bureaucrats and their associated agendas. The Common Core curriculum is a copyrighted program that doesn’t allow for deviation, although you can add up to 15% of content, you cannot delete any part of the standards. We oppose Social indoctrination of our children where they will be taught what to think instead of how to think.

I have collected allot of data on Common Core, my sources include The John Birch Society, The Heritage Foundation, Americans for Prosperity, Civitas, The John Locke Foundation, The North Carolina Education Alliance, The American Principals Project , the North Carolina Institute for Constitutional Law , Michelle Malkin, and even Wikipedia. I have forwarded information to all of the craven country school board members on more than one occasion. I am disappointed that only one of you has seen fit to reply to any of my correspondence. Since I can prove I have reasons to be concerned, Can you give us any reasons not to be?

                                                                                                                     

Info provided by:

Raynor James, PR Chair, Coastal Carolina Taxpayers Association (CCTA)

252-288-6228 (home)

252-626-2804 (cell)

305 Calico Drive, New Bern, North Carolina, 28560

Letter to the Editor, Common Core

 

There are several Onslow County citizens that have been trying to stop the infliction of Common Core on the education system of this county.  We have tried to educate our fellow citizens in meetings and face to face discussions, as well as informing the County School Board about this “progressive” educational inhibitor. 

 

Recently I had the opportunity to talk before the school board about the increase in the school budget this would cause, but was only allowed 3 minutes.  I did not get to finish what needed to be said, so that information is what follows.

 

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My thanks to the Onslow County School Board for this opportunity to speak.

 

What I have to talk about has to do with the budget for the Onslow County School system and the affect Common Core will have on it.  According to the state of North Carolina, the cost for the Common Core Standards is an increase of $389 per student.  I am not sure if that is correct. 

 

There are Professional Development courses that are required to train the teachers on the new Common Core academic standards and methods.  This Professional Teacher Development will cost $1,931 per teacher.  There are 1,565 teachers.  That is a cost of $3,022,015.  There are the 26 Instructional Coordinators that are in the system and they will need the training.  That cost is $50,206.  I don’t know if the teacher’s assistants or the Instructional Aids will need the training, but there are 527 of them.  That would be a cost of $1,017,637.  This runs to a total of $4,089,858.  This is with a student to teacher ratio of 15 to 1. 

 

The records show the current student testing cost is about $10 per student.  The student testing under Common Core will go to $28 or $29 per student.  That is an increase of $18 or $19 per test per student.  The test questions will be made public after the test so each year new questions and tests will need to be developed so the cost will just go up.  These tests are purchased from an outside source.  According to the county records there are 24,046 students. With the increase in student testing charges of $18 or $19 per student per test that means the increase in testing cost will be $456,874.

 

I could not find any information on the cost of new text books that would be needed, so I am going to project a cost of $30 per book and I think that will be low.  This would be approximately $750,000 or in other terms, three quarters of a million dollars.  

 

So far that comes to a total increase in spending of $5,296,732.  Some of this will be one-time expenditures, but much will be reoccurring cost that will do nothing but climb over the years until the county and state can no longer carry the load and we have to turn our entire educational system over to the Federal Government.

 

This increase in cost does not include the cost of upgrades and improvements to local infrastructure.  Common Core testing in North Carolina will have to be taken on computers.  The state and local education authorities will have to examine concerns about bandwidths and technology.  Are there enough computers? Are the schools wired for the extra power requirements?  If they are going to be hardwired, are the schools wired for this with Cat-6 wiring?  Or are all the computers going to be on Wi-Fi with a central server in each school or will each school need several servers?  How about the additional bandwidth needed to connect each school with the central offices of the school system?  How often will the school system need to upgrade the computers in the classrooms?  Who pays for that?  I am guessing that will be the local county taxpayer.

 

There are many more questions to be asked and each question shows an increase in the cost of this “social progressive” system. 

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What I had not planned to bring up was the $75 million bond request they have upcoming this year nor the approximant $86 million that stills remains on the last bond they had.  I was also not going to bring up that in a conversation with an administrative staff member at one of the informational meetings they admitted that were going to request another bond in just 2 years.  With the proposed 2013 – 2014 budget having the education department taking up over 31% of the county funds, I have to ask: Just how much does the School Board want?  I have not had a raise in 4 years.  How am I supposed to pay these additional taxes?

Yes, I want the children to be well educated, but Common Core will not get that job done.  Looking at the overall school budget and financial requests the $5 million plus that Common Core will cost in its first year may seem a small thing, but we need to stop spending money in some places now.

Common Core is not only costly, as well as not needed, it is a bad thing for the students.

 

Respectfully,

 

Thomas H. Austin

Citizen of Onslow County