US imam calls on Muslims in US to wage jihad

The controversial imam of a prominent mosque in Arlington, Va., has urged immigrant Muslims in the United States to wage war for Islam.

“The enemies of Allah are lining up. The question for us is, are we lining [up] or are we afraid because they may call us terrorists?” Shaker Elsayed told a crowd of Ethiopian Muslims during a lecture at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Va.

“Let me give you the good news: they are already calling us terrorists anyway. Whether you sitting at home, watching TV, drinking coffee, sleeping or playing with your kids, you are a terrorist because you are a Muslim.”

“Well, give them a run for their money. Make it worth it. Make this title worth it, and be a good Muslim,” said the Cairo-born Muslim.

“Muslim men when it is a price to pay, they are first in line. … They are the first in the community-service line. They are the first in jihad line,” he declared to applause.

At the end of the imam’s incendiary speech, a representative of the Ethiopian group walked to the podium and declared the speech was not calling for jihad.

“Just a disclaimer,” the emcee said. “Imam Shakir, he’s not advocating for armed struggle in Ethiopia. He’s just simply giving us a lesson. We’ll just continue with our non-violent struggle until these guys who are in prison [in Ethiopia] who did not bow down for this repressive government … are free.”

Imam Johari Abdul-Malik, the press secretary for the imam’s Dar al-Hijrah mosque, did not respond to messages from The Daily Caller.

“If Dar al-Hijrah were like most American religious institutions it would fire Elsayed, but it’s not like most religious institutions,” John Rossomando, a researcher at the Investigative Project on Terrorism.

“The mosque operates as a front for Hamas … [and] has the distinction of being connected with more terror plots than just about any other mosque in America,” he said in a statement to TheDC.

Ethiopia is a majority-Christian country and has defended itself from encroaching Muslims armies for more than 1,000 years. Currently, Muslims in Ethiopia’s Ogaden region complain that the central government has not given them autonomy.

“Ethiopian muslims are protesting against perceived government interference in their activities … [and] observers fear the latest move by the government would spark protests by muslims in the Horn of Africa country,” said a website run by Badr Ethiopia, an Ethiopian Muslim group.

The group cites the controversial Council on American Islamic Relations as an affiliate.

Elsayed’s comments add to his history of controversial statements that match orthodox Islam, but which clash with American culture.

In 1990, for example, The New York Times quoted him saying that the murder of a radical Jewish nationalist in New York was legal under Muslim law.

The murder of rabbi Meir Kahane “was not a violation, in the sense that Kahane adopted a position against all Arabs and Muslims,” said Elsayed, according to the Times.

According to numerous Islamic leaders, Islamic law endorses the use of war to expand the rule of Islam. The law, dubbed Shariah, also endorses the killing of Islam’s critics, including poets Christian preachers, and it allows only grudging recognition of non-Islamic governments.

For orthodox Muslims, civilian law is subordinate to Islamic requirements.

That provision has been implemented, at least in part, in Egypt’s new 2012 constitution. The constitution was mostly written by legislators in the political party created by the international Muslim Brotherhood organization.

Source:  Daily Caller, by Neil Munro  7:03 PM 02/26/2013

http://dailycaller.com/2013/02/26/us-imam-calls-on-muslims-in-us-to-wage-jihad/#ixzz2M8zXQ6pL

One Half Billion – UN Global Population Goal

30 population Control Quotes Show that the Elite Truly Believe that Humans are a Plague upon the Earth  by Michael Snyder – The Truth Wins

There is a clear consensus among the global elite that overpopulation is the primary cause of the most important problems that the world is facing and that something desperately needs to be done about it. They truly believe that humans are a plague upon the earth and that we will literally destroy the planet if we are left to our own devices.

To the elite, everything from global warming to our growing economic problems can be directly traced back to the lack of population control. They warn that if nothing is done about the exploding population, we will be facing a future full of poverty, war and suffering on a filthy, desolate planet.

They complain that it "costs too much" to keep elderly patients that are terminally ill alive, and they eagerly promote abortion for babies that are "not wanted" because they would be "too much of a burden" on society. Anything that reduces the human population in any way is a good thing for those that believe in this philosophy.

This twisted philosophy is being promoted in our movies, in our television shows, in our music, in countless books, on many of the most prominent websites in the world, and it is being taught at nearly all of the most important colleges and universities on the planet.

The people promoting this philosophy have very, very deep pockets, and they are actually convinced that they are helping to "save the world" by trying to reduce the size of the human population. In fact, many of them are entirely convinced that we are in a "life or death" struggle for the fate of the planet, and that if humanity does not willingly choose to embrace population control soon, then a solution will have to be "forced" upon them.

Yes, I know that all of this may sound like something out of a science fiction novel. But there are a whole lot of people out there that are absolutely obsessed with this stuff, and many of them are in very prominent positions around the globe.

The following are 30 population control quotes which show that the elite truly believe that humans are a plague upon the earth and that a great culling is necessary...

1. UK Television Presenter Sir David Attenborough: "We are a plague on the Earth. It’s coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so. It’s not just climate change; it’s sheer space, places to grow food for this enormous horde. Either we limit our population growth or the natural world will do it for us, and the natural world is doing it for us right now"

2. Paul Ehrlich, a former science adviser to president George W. Bush and the author of "The Population Bomb": "To our minds, the fundamental cure, reducing the scale of the human enterprise (including the size of the population) to keep its aggregate consumption within the carrying capacity of Earth is obvious but too much neglected or denied"

3. Paul Ehrlich again, this time on the size of families: "Nobody, in my view, has the right to have 12 children or even three unless the second pregnancy is twins"

4. Dave Foreman, the co-founder of Earth First: "We humans have become a disease, the Humanpox."

5. CNN Founder Ted Turner: "A total world population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal."

6. Japan’s Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso about medical patients with serious illnesses: "You cannot sleep well when you think it’s all paid by the government. This won’t be solved unless you let them hurry up and die."

7. David Rockefeller: "The negative impact of population growth on all of our planetary ecosystems is becoming appallingly evident."

8. Environmental activist Roger Martin: "On a finite planet, the optimum population providing the best quality of life for all, is clearly much smaller than the maximum, permitting bare survival. The more we are, the less for each; fewer people mean better lives."

9. HBO personality Bill Maher: "I’m pro-choice, I’m for assisted suicide, I’m for regular suicide, I’m for whatever gets the freeway moving – that’s what I’m for. It’s too crowded, the planet is too crowded and we need to promote death."

10. MIT professor Penny Chisholm: "The real trick is, in terms of trying to level off at someplace lower than that 9 billion, is to get the birthrates in the developing countries to drop as fast as we can. And that will determine the level at which humans will level off on earth."

11. Julia Whitty, a columnist for Mother Jones: "The only known solution to ecological overshoot is to decelerate our population growth faster than it’s decelerating now and eventually reverse it—at the same time we slow and eventually reverse the rate at which we consume the planet’s resources. Success in these twin endeavors will crack our most pressing global issues: climate change, food scarcity, water supplies, immigration, health care, biodiversity loss, even war. On one front, we’ve already made unprecedented strides, reducing global fertility from an average 4.92 children per woman in 1950 to 2.56 today—an accomplishment of trial and sometimes brutally coercive error, but also a result of one woman at a time making her individual choices. The speed of this childbearing revolution, swimming hard against biological programming, rates as perhaps our greatest collective feat to date."

12. Colorado State University Professor Philip Cafaro in a paper entitled “Climate Ethics and Population Policy”: "Ending human population growth is almost certainly a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for preventing catastrophic global climate change. Indeed, significantly reducing current human numbers may be necessary in order to do so."

13. Professor of Biology at the University of Texas at Austin Eric R. Pianka: "I do not bear any ill will toward people. However, I am convinced that the world, including all humanity, WOULD clearly be much better off without so many of us."

14. Detroit News Columnist Nolan Finley: "Since the national attention is on birth control, here’s my idea: If we want to fight poverty, reduce violent crime and bring down our embarrassing drop-out rate, we should swap contraceptives for fluoride in Michigan’s drinking water.
      "We’ve got a baby problem in Michigan. Too many babies are born to immature parents who don’t have the skills to raise them, too many are delivered by poor women who can’t afford them, and too many are fathered by sorry layabouts who spread their seed like dandelions and then wander away from the consequences."

15. John Guillebaud, professor of family planning at University College London: "The effect on the planet of having one child less is an order of magnitude greater than all these other things we might do, such as switching off lights. An extra child is the equivalent of a lot of flights across the planet."

16. Democrat strategist Steven Rattner: "WE need death panels. Well, maybe not death panels, exactly, but unless we start allocating health care resources more prudently — rationing, by its proper name — the exploding cost of Medicare will swamp the federal budget."

17. Matthew Yglesias, a business and economics correspondent for Slate, in an article entitled "The Case for Death Panels, in One Chart": "But not only is this health care spending on the elderly the key issue in the federal budget, our disproportionate allocation of health care dollars to old people surely accounts for the remarkable lack of apparent cost effectiveness of the American health care system. When the patient is already over 80, the simple fact of the matter is that no amount of treatment is going to work miracles in terms of life expectancy or quality of life."

18. Planned Parenthood Founder Margaret Sanger: "All of our problems are the result of overbreeding among the working class."

19. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: "Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of."

20. Planned Parenthood Founder Margaret Sanger: "The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it."

21. Salon columnist Mary Elizabeth Williams in an article entitled "So What If Abortion Ends Life?": "All life is not equal. That’s a difficult thing for liberals like me to talk about, lest we wind up looking like death-panel-loving, kill-your-grandma-and-your-precious-baby storm troopers. Yet a fetus can be a human life without having the same rights as the woman in whose body it resides."

22. Alberto Giubilini of Monash University in Melbourne, Australia and Francesca Minerva of the University of Melbourne in a paper published in the Journal of Medical Ethics: "[W]hen circumstances occur after birth such that they would have justified abortion, what we call after-birth abortion should be permissible. … We propose to call this practice ‘after-birth abortion’, rather than ‘infanticide,’ to emphasize that the moral status of the individual killed is comparable with that of a fetus … rather than to that of a child.  Therefore, we claim thatkilling a newborn could be ethically permissible in all the circumstances where abortion would be. Such circumstances include cases where the newborn has the potential to have an (at least) acceptable life, but the well-being of the family is at risk."

23. Nina Fedoroff, a key adviser to Hillary Clinton: "We need to continue to decrease the growth rate of the global population; the planet can't support many more people.

24. Barack Obama's primary science adviser, John P. Holdren: "A program of sterilizing women after their second or third child, despite the relatively greater difficulty of the operation than vasectomy, might be easier to implement than trying to sterilize men.
       "The development of a long-term sterilizing capsule that could be implanted under the skin and removed when pregnancy is desired opens additional possibilities for coercive fertility control. The capsule could be implanted at puberty and might be removable, with official permission, for a limited number of births."

25. David Brower, the first Executive Director of the Sierra Club: "Childbearing [should be] a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license ... All potential parents [should be] required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing."

26. Thomas Ferguson, former official in the U.S. State Department Office of Population Affairs: "There is a single theme behind all our work–we must reduce population levels. Either governments do it our way, through nice clean methods, or they will get the kinds of mess that we have in El Salvador, or in Iran or in Beirut. Population is a political problem. Once population is out of control, it requires authoritarian government, even fascism, to reduce it…"

27. Mikhail Gorbachev: "We must speak more clearly about sexuality, contraception, about abortion, about values that control population, because the ecological crisis, in short, is the population crisis. Cut the population by 90% and there aren’t enough people left to do a great deal of ecological damage."

28. Jacques Costeau: "In order to stabilize world population, we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. It is a horrible thing to say, but it is just as bad not to say it."

29. Finnish environmentalist Pentti Linkola: "If there were a button I could press, I would sacrifice myself without hesitating if it meant millions of people would die"

30. Prince Phillip, husband of Queen Elizabeth II and co-founder of the World Wildlife Fund: "In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation."

There is so much more that could be said about all of this.

If you would like to learn more, the following are 10 of my previous articles about the population control agenda of the global elite...

#1 "The Population Control Agenda Of The Radical Humanists Who Would Love For You And I To Die"

#2 "They Love Death"

#3 "From 7 Billion People To 500 Million People – The Sick Population Control Agenda Of The Global Elite"

#4 "Al Gore, Agenda 21 And Population Control"

#5 "The Green Agenda Is About Getting Rid Of As Many Humans As Possible"

#6 "Governments Around The World Are Eagerly Adopting The Strict Population Control Agenda Of The United Nations"

#7 "One Less Child? Environmental Extremists Warn That Overpopulation Is Causing Climate Change And Will Ultimately Destroy The Earth"

#8 "Hillary Clinton: Population Control Will Now Become The Centerpiece Of U.S. Foreign Policy"

#9 "New U.N. Report: We Must Reduce The Population To Fight Climate Change"

#10 "To The Global Elite The Math Is Simple: Human Overpopulation Is Causing Climate Change So The Solution To Climate Change Is Population Control"

Carbon Conquered

Why All The Fuss? U.S. Carbon Emissions Lowest Since '94
by DICK MORRIS  Published on DickMorris.com on February 4, 2013

We don't need more regulation of energy use, cap and trade, carbon taxes, or any of the range of new measures President Obama is pushing to deal with climate change.  According to Bloomberg News, US carbon emissions are down 13% over the past five years and that they are now the lowest since 1994.  In fact, we are more than halfway to President Obama's goal of a 17% reduction below our peak year of 2007.

Free market developments like the higher cost of coal relative to natural gas, the high price of gasoline, and greater energy efficiency in commercial buildings are all doing the job.  We don't need big government here.

Coal has fallen to only 18% of our energy use (down from 23% in 2007) and natural gas is up to 31%.  Natural gas has half the carbon emissions of coal.

Evidence suggests that climate change and global warming are happening, but at a much slower rate than doomsday warnings suggested.  We are now on track for an increase in global temperatures of one degree centigrade by 2100.  This increase is not enough to cause major flooding or rises in sea levels.

The fears of some climatologists had been that the direct increase in global temperatures - which are happening as predicted and are largely moderate - would be augmented by a two or three degree centigrade increase by 2100 due to water vapor.  Their fear was that a brighter sun would cause more evaporation and that the resulting water vapor itself would become a greenhouse gas, raising global temperatures even further.  This prediction has not come to pass in the past seventeen years of climate monitoring.  The model was wrong.

In his inaugural address, Obama demanded a reduction of carbon emissions to save future generations from global climate change.  But this danger is proving to be illusory and largely addressed by free market activity and public education.

The gaping hole in carbon reductions efforts is China which refuses to act to cut them.  Claiming it is a developing country, the world's second largest economy is its largest carbon emitter.  Indeed, each year China's emissions grow by an amount that exceeds the total emissions of Japan.   So each year, the increase in Chinese GDP (about $400 billion) causes more emissions than the total of the Japanese economy which is ten times as much -- $5 trillion.

Obama is using climate change as an excuse to regulate and tax American business because that is what he believes in.  But the excuse is vanishing.  So should the regulations.

Comments:

Global warming was always a hoax.  The federal government has squandered $ trillions on this and congressional hearings are in order.  It’s time to quit the UN and close down “cap and trade”. The House should pass he bills and send them to the Senate to pile up until 2014, it’s not that far away.

Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader

Save All Schools from Common Core

Support GA SB 167  Feb 28

Georgia Senate Bill 167 is a bill that needs a "rally at the State Capitol."  If you are familiar with Race to the Top and the Common Core Standards for K-12, then you know the potential impact on Christian schools and home schools. SB 167 will void the adoption of this curricula, and prohibit state education agencies from entering into any commitments relating to the federal Race to the Top program.

The full Senate Education and Youth Committee will consider the bill on Thursday, Feb. 28 in the afternoon (1:00 or 2:00 p.m.). It is not necessary to have people to speak at the  Committee meeting, but it is important to show a large group of supporters. There may be a Press Conference in the morning where it would be good to have a crowd of supporters, too.

There are Talking Points to help you understand this issue. I included links below for further information, including the impact on private and home schools. This website has much information: stopcommoncore.com . Also attached is a list of the Senators on the Committee that is meeting on Thursday. If your school, or school families, are in any of their districts, please contact them. Of course, feel free to contact any and all of them.

Here are the links:

Affect of Common Core on Private school/home school

Legislator wants state to back out of Common Core curriculum (newspaper article about SB 167)

Common Core K-12 hits home (affect on home school)

MEMBERS of SENATE EDUCATION COMMITTEE

Sen. Lindsey Tippins   Chairman   404-657-0406   lindsey.tippins@senate.ga.gov 

John Wilkinson   404-463-5257   john.wilkinson@senate.ga.gov 

Freddie Powell Sims  404-463-5259 freddie.sims@senate.ga.gov 

Dean Burke   404-656-0040   Dean.Burke@senate.ga.gov 

Vincent Fort   404-656-5091   vincent.fort@senate.ga.gov 

Chuck Hufstetler   404-656-0034     chuck.hufstetler@senate.ga.gov 

Donzella James   404-463-1379   donzella.james@senate.ga.gov 

Fran Millar   404-463-2260   Donna.Nealey@senate.ga.gov 

Butch Miller  404-656-6578  Caroline.Howard@senate.ga.gov 

Jesse Stone   404-463-1314   jesse.stone@senate.ga.gov 

Horacena Tate   404-463-8053   horacena.tate@senate.ga.gov 

General Talking Points

Common Core Standards Talking Points

• We reject nationalized standards and centralized educational control across the nation.

• We will not surrender our constitutional right to control Georgia's educational standards and curriculum to Washington, D.C. bureaucrats and corporations masquerading as non-profits.

• We demand world-class, state-directed standards through a transparent, democratic process. We do not have to settle for a "one-size fits all" Common Core developed behind closed doors.

• Collection of personal data on our students from pre-school, through college, and into the workforce for government planning and research is an invasion of our privacy and our constitutional rights.

• The computer-generated testing of the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) will become a straightjacket for classroom instruction. Even students in charter schools will have to take the PARCC tests. This means that charter schools, like traditional schools, will have to teach the CCSS-aligned curriculum.

• We require legislative accountability and up-front cost analysis of all federal grant programs which push unfunded mandates down to state and local systems.   

Objections Based on Constitutional/Federalist/Legal Considerations

• The U.S. Department of Education coerced states into adopting the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) by tying their adoption to a chance to compete for Race to the Top grants.

• As explained by Robert Eitel and Kent Talbert, former deputy general counsel and general counsel, respectively, of USED, the point of standards is to drive curriculum; therefore, through CCSS, the federal government is violating these three statutes: the General Education Provisions Act, the Department of Education Organization Act, and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. These statutes prohibit the U.S. Department of Education (USED) from directing, supervising, or controlling school curriculum.

• Because PARCC admits that it is using some of this federal funding to develop "curriculum frameworks," USED support of PARCC also violates the three federal statutes.

• In some smaller Georgia school districts, lack of funds for purchasing new textbooks means that teachers are directly teaching the CCSS - as one South Georgia superintendent said, "The standards are the curriculum."   

Objections Based on Loss of State Control Over Standards

• Georgia and other states were required to adopt CCSS word for word - they may not change or delete anything, and may add only a small amount of content (which will not be included on the PARCC assessments and therefore probably will not be taught in the classroom).

• There is no defined system for governance of CCSS in the future - CCSS is owned and copyrighted by NGA and CCSSO, so those trade associations can determine how much - or how little - input states will have into future revisions. How can parents, teachers, citizens, or even legislators have input into this undemocratic, unaccountable process ?  

Objections Based on Cost

• No cost study was done before Georgia adopted CCSS.

• Georgia's Race to the Top grant totaled $400 million over four years - much less than the cost of CCSS implementation and testing. Unfunded mandates and long-term maintenance will cost Georgia taxpayers far more than the grant money received. Georgia's taxpayers already pay  $13 billion in state and local taxes for K-12 education every year.  A mere $400 million federal grant, over four-years, should not usurp state and local control.

Source: Georgia Home Education Association Ken Patterson

Common Core Opposed by Private Schools

Homeschoolers, Christian Schools Concerned About 'Race to the Top' Standards

Christian school leaders, both homeschooling and private, are worried that federal education policies will infringe upon their autonomy.

Race to the Top is a federal program set up as a competition among the states to receive education grants. It required states to adopt the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI) standards in order to compete for the funds, even before states knew what those standards would be.

The CCSSI was developed by a division of the National Governor's Association, a private organization, and largely funded by the Gates Foundation. The first round of applications were due January 2010. The first draft of the CCSSI was released afterward, in March 2010. The second round of Race to the Top applications were then due June 1 2010, the day before the final draft of the CCSSI was published.

In an interview with The Christian Post, Maureen Van Den Berg, legislative director for the American Association of Christian Schools, expressed concern over the potential that the CCSSI could develop into a national curriculum that even private schools would be pushed into adopting.

"One of our biggest concerns is that [CCSSI] will turn into a national curriculum," Van Den Berg said. "If the federal government already has their fingers in the national standard movement because they tied the Race to the Top competition, the very first one, to the state's adoption of the common core standards, by tying the Race to the Top competition to whether or not the states adopted that, that's an indirect endorsement of the national standards, so it could very easily become a national curriculum. So, we're very concerned from a private Christian school perspective."

Van Den Berg also disfavors, in general, policies that infringe upon the local control of education.

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"Anytime you've got a one size fits all attitude regarding education, it's never good for the students, the parents, or education in general," Van Den Berg added.

Homeschooling advocates share similar concerns. In an interview with The Christian Post, William Estrada, director of federal relations for the Home School Legal Defense Association, said that his organization opposes the pressuring of the states by the federal government to adopt the CCSSI, because policies that take away local autonomy for education also threaten homeschools.

"Our concern for homeschool freedom is that if every state and every student's curriculum adheres to the CCSSI, the pressure will mount for homeschool students to be taught and tested in line with the CCSSI. Many homeschool families choose to homeschool specifically because they want a different or better curriculum than that offered in their public school, and they would lose this freedom if they were required to follow the CCSSI. So far the CCSSI only applies to public schools, but it is doubtful policy makers would allow it to stay that way if it truly did become a national curriculum," Estrada said.

One of the ways that Christian schools and homeschools could be pushed into adopting the CCSSI is through college admission requirements, Van Den Berg explained. Since a large portion of these students will seek college admission, if the CCSSI were to become a basis for college admission or college admission exams, Christian school and homeschool teachers may feel obligated to adopt the CCSSI standards for their curriculum.

One of the architects of the CCSSI, David Coleman, was recently appointed CEO of College Board. One of the primary vehicles for determining admission by most colleges in the United States is the SAT exam, which is administered by College Board.

The Chronicle for Higher Education noted that Coleman views his new position at College Board as an opportunity to "bridge the divide" between K-12 and college education, and he hopes to align the SAT with the CCSSI.

Van Den Berg and Estrada did not express any particular concerns about Coleman at this time, noting that it is too early to tell what he will do in his new position.

"So long as Mr. Coleman doesn't try to use his position to push states that have refused the CCSSI and homeschool students into a de facto CCSSI requirement through changing the tests, HSLDA has no concerns," Estrada said.

READ: CRACKDOWN ON HOMESCHOOLING IN THE NEAR FUTURE?

Contact: napp.nazworth@christianpost.com, @NappNazworth (Twitter)
Read more at http://www.christianpost.com/news/home-schoolers-christian-schools-concerned-about-race-to-the-top-standards-79568/#3Rm2bPptMrGdomM0.99

Common Core not for Alabama

This article responds to unfounded claims made in a joint OpEd written by State Board of Education Members Mary Scott Hunter of Huntsville and Tracey Roberts of Mobile.

Their OpEd reveals a naiveté about the meaning of the current presidential administration’s description of Common Core as a revolution to help in the battle for social justice, as well as the role of special interests which want to exploit our children to make billions of dollars.  The education of our children should not be controlled by the Far Left which sees classrooms

as laboratories for indoctrination at taxpayer expense, or by special interests which see students as a source for profit. 

Common Core is just the latest but well-disguised ploy to federalize education and take our Tenth Amendment rights.   By chaining our children to Common Core, the state board of education has fundamentally changed our education system without the knowledge or consent of legislators, parents,

and taxpayers.  The following is a rebuttal to the OpEd by Board Members Hunter and Tracey.

The Common Core State Standards Initiative does not strengthen but dumbs down education standards 

Math:  Common Core math standards do not meet the recommended content targets of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel, of leading states, or international competitors.  As a result, students are not prepared for four-year colleges but for two-year nonselective community colleges.  Dr. James Milgram of Sanford University, a mathematician, warns us that graduating students will be two years behind other countries in math skills.

English Language Arts:  Education experts warn that reading levels for seniors will be reduced to what is currently 7th grade.   Authors of “Why the Common Core is Bad for America” write:  The Common Core college readiness’ ELA standards can best be described as skill sets, not fully developed standards.  As such, they cannot point to readiness for a high school diploma or four-year college coursework. The ELA Common Core

Standards will impair the preparation of students for competing in a global economy.”  

Alabama does not control its standards or its curriculum

Alabama Standards:  Hunter and Roberts want us to believe that “Alabama Standards” are different from Common Core standards.  They are, in fact, one and the same.  Common Core is a one-size-fits-all for all states, all schools, and all students.  Alabama must adopt 100% of Common Core

standards, cannot change or delete anything, and may allow only a small amount of additional content, which won’t be covered on national tests.  All one has to do to understand how specific Alabama Standards” consist of a mere 2.5% in English Language Arts and 14% in Math, and all the rest is

Common Core, is to link to Alabama standards at

https://docs.alsde.edu/documents/54/1%202010%20Alabama%20English%20Language%20Arts%20Course%20of%20Study.pdf and 2010 Alabama Mathematics Course of Study.pdf.

Alabama Curriculum:  Alabama’s curriculum is controlled by Common Core standards.  This is abundantly clear when you read the legal documents and implementation plan.   Curricula, assessments, everything, must be aligned to Common Core. 

Common Core does not offer more rigor” Education experts have dispelled the notion that Common Core has more rigor.  Some of us joke that Common Core is rigor mortis.  It stifles

innovation, creativity, and flexibility. 

The federal government requires the state to collect non-academic information on students and to track them from preschool to retirement

The federal government by law is not allowed to maintain a national database on students, so the U.S. Department of Education requires states to collect information to be used by federal agencies and private organizations. Recently, Ms. Hunter stated that the Federal Privacy and Family Protection

Act prevents highly personal information from being collected and shared. Apparently she’s unaware that President Obama expanded the interpretation of this law, effective January 3, 2012, and weakened student protections.  The bill to repeal Common Core restores privacy protection for Alabama students.

The Common Core Initiative was not state-led

Common Core standards were developed by special interest groups and led by vendors who stand to make substantial profits off our children.  The bulk of the work was done by Achieve, Inc., a D.C.-based nonprofit, associated with

the Far Left education reformers such as Bill Ayers, Marc Tucker and Linda Darling-Hammond, who have advocated for federalized education for decades. These efforts have been repeatedly and resoundingly rejected by the public and Congress.  

This time is different because the creators of Common Core found a cover to end-run Congress and develop standards outside the public meetings act. This cover was the National Governors Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CSSO), two trade associations, which have no

legislative authority to act on behalf of states.  Massive funding came from private interests such as the Gates Foundation.  Bill Gates expects to spend about $380 million to get states to adopt Common Core.  He will make billions off this investment.  

Special interests, in concert with the Obama Administration, rushed states to adopt Common Core before the public could catch on, rise, and resist. Informed elected officials should not be complicit in these lawless actions that invade student privacy, take away parental control and states rights, and will cost Alabama taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.  Only Gov. Bentley, Stephanie Bell and Betty Peters voted to withdraw from Common Core. Now it’s up to the Alabama legislature to protect our children’s privacy and preserve our education freedom under the Tenth Amendment. 

According to a 2002 Alabama Supreme Court decision, “The Alabama Constitution vests the duty to provide for public education squarely upon the shoulders of the Legislature.”  (Ex-parte James, 836 S. 3d. 813 at 85). The Alabama Legislature has repeatedly instructed the state board of education in matters dealing with standards and curricula.  Legislators are now our last line of defense, and it is their duty to protect our children and their future, as well as Alabama values and states rights.  They have an opportunity to prove that checks and balances work in Alabama, though not in Washington, D.C.  The Legislature must repeal Common Core this year.  Next year will be too late!  A Republican super-majority should assure a rapid repeal.

Source: Alabamians United for Excellence in Education, COMMON CORE:  A Cookie-Cutter, One-Size-Fits All Education Standards by Sharon Sewell Director, Alabamians United for Excellence in Education (http://www.auee.org <http://www.auee.org/> )

Comments:

Common Core is the next Trojan Horse gift from the U.S. Department of Education with more local cost and less bribe money.  If we support GA SB 167 we can do better ourselves.

Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader