Common Core & US Chamber Of Commerce

The US Chamber of Commerce has entered the Common Core Debate on the side of cookie-cutter indoctrination.

The US Chamber of Commerce has shown its true colors. The organization represents itself as a pro-business organization in favor of increasing the quality of workers available in the labor pool, making the average American more competitive in the business world. However, the group is in full support of nationalized indoctrination programs such as Common Core.

Common Core is anything but pro-business and pro-capitalism. The controversial conglomeration of standardized, one-size-fits-all education curricula opposes individuality. It opposes individual growth and prosperity. It pushes for group grades for group projects instead of individual efforts and production. As most people know, competition is an incentive to test one's limits and excel. Common Core seeks to achieve better results in education by removing the competition and redistributing the grades and knowledge individuals earn.

It also ignores basic tenets of cognizant and early childhood development, expecting kids to learn things at the meta-cognitive, analytical, and abstract levels while their brains are developed to only the concrete, factual, definitive levels of comprehension. What this does is push a false belief that there are no absolutes, there are no wrong answers, and that every wrong answer can be justified. The system also favors indoctrinating Marxist, Tolstoyian, and communist ideologies.

The US Chamber of Commerce jumped into the fight. Instead of supporting free thought and debate on the subject, they chose to vilify conservatives and libertarians who oppose this 10th Amendment violating concept called Common Core. While the given link has a dot-com suffix, it is directly linked to US Government agencies, notably within the executive branch, which is controlled by Common Core supporter Barack Obama.

On the organization's website, you can find a pledge to support Common Core:

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation urges you to show your support for college- and career-ready standards by reading and signing the Common Core pledge below:
I appreciate the steps that 45 states and the District of Columbia have taken to advance our education system by better preparing students for college and the workforce.
Increasing the rigor of standards and sharpening the focus on the skills needed to succeed is essential to the health of the economy and ultimately to benefit our students.  It is for that reason that I believe the following:

• The Common Core State Standards, voluntarily adopted by states, will better prepare students for college and career than existing state standards.
  
• These standards lay out what a student should know and be able to do at the end of each year, including being ready for college and/or the workforce upon high school graduation.
  
• State and local education leaders maintain the authority to implement these standards, including setting the curriculum, choosing materials, and providing professional development. Common Core does not dictate the rights of teachers and administrators.
  

I support the full implementation of Common Core academic standards for the benefit of our children, our workforce, and our economy.
Please complete the information below to sign the Common Core Pledge and support higher academic standards.

Responsible and loving parents probably have a response to that pledge that is not fit for a radio broadcast. Expletives aside, many will respond with #WeTheParents say #NoMore.

Responsible and loving parents that want their children to succeed and prosper might be better served taking a different pledge or oath.


Here is one suggestion:

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under G-d, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

I pledge allegiance to the US Constitution, all of its articles and amendments. The first ten of  those are my rights as this supreme law protects. This supreme law also guards my sacred liberties and individual natural rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

I pledge allegiance to my progeny, the future of my great Republic, and the flag which stands for it. I promise to teach them the importance of individual natural rights, our founding ideals, and the supremacy of the US Constitution. 

Another might be:

I promise to fight redistribution in all of its forms, be it economic, intellectual, real property, thought, effort, merit, or achievement. A team is only as strong as its weakest link and individual competition motivates all those links to be stronger. I promise to fight Common Core and all for which it stands. I promise to give my progeny the opportunities to be leaders, successful, and examples of excellence. 

It's About the $, Not The Kids

The US Chamber of Commerce backing Common Core demonstrates that Common Core is not for the betterment of our children. It is all about oligopolies, oligarchies, and lining the pockets of the chosen few.

The proof is found if one looks into those who back Common Core. Among them is Bill Gates. Gates is a fine example of ingenuity, capitalism, and free-market competition. If it weren't for early computer tech companies like Apple, Cisco, Texas Instruments, IBM, and Commodore, Gates may not have had the opportunities to find his niche nor the incentives to compete and strive to build Microsoft into the powerhouse it currently is. However, Gates is in favor of socialist oligarchies. He is openly left-wing in economic and political ideology. He is one of Common Core's largest supporters.

General Electric is another. GE received $139 billion in taxpayer money to bail them out during the recession. The translation is that they were bought out by the Democratic majority in the federal government at the time of the TARP bailouts.

So is the UAW, a pro-Marxist workers' union. The UAW was, perhaps, the largest beneficiary of the poorly managed and executed TARP bailouts.

Where this leads is to the educational materials industry. Any college student can attest to the already inflated costs of textbooks. They are a "captive audience", mandated to use the books in order to pass the classes. The textbook market has become an oligopoly. Compare the prices of comparable textbooks that a given course could use. The prices are relatively similar. So is the quality.

With the advent of the internet and digital "e-books", textbook publishers face competition from outside the hard-print market. Online assets and materials are readily available. That brings the current competition for computer-based learning and educational materials. If only a hand-full of these are approved nationally to meet Common Core standards, they will join the current oligopoly. They will seek to have the oligarchy change regulations, the standards, to deter competition. The members of the oligopoly and oligarchy get rich. Consumers are stuck with a limited market. Potential competitors are prevented from providing what could, in reality, be better products and competing in the market.

Look at the CSCOPE and Common Core aligned applications and sites being used in Texas. I-Station in Texas is fully funded by taxpayers as approved by the Texas State Board of Education. It is a Common Core education and assessment tool. Common Core assessment tools are against Texas state law. Yet the state is paying for one. Another is the site Think Through Math. TTM is designed specifically for Common Core. It was sponsored and pushed onto Texas students through CSCOPE. Despite being illegal to use in Texas, public schools still use it. Teachers and administrators will tell parents that it is optional. However, if parents don't allow its use in the home, the students are forced to use it in the classroom. Many times, the kids are "punished", denied recess, in order to get their time on TTM. This is despite parents' decisions to not allow their kids to use CSCOPE or Common Core materials.

The subscriptions cost money. Those fees are paid by taxpayers, against their will. The owners and operators of the sites get rich. Our kids are taught through these "common core" collectivist methods that have already proven ineffective. Heck, kids don't even learn multiplication tables anymore. They are taught concepts before facts. That is backwards. It is unethical. And it is a waste of our tax money.

So, along comes the US Chamber of Commerce. They back the oligopoly's production of these poor and ineffective "educational materials" that back cognitive theories already proven incorrect. They do so to increase the power of the oligarchy, to indoctrinate slaves skilled in only what they decide. They steal opportunity. They steal choice. They steal the pursuit of happiness. They do all of this and get rich in doing so. There is a word for that crime:  FRAUD.


H/T to Kurt Schlichter for pointing out the US Chamber of Commerce's "pledge".