Parents in South Carolina who are part of a nationwide revolt
against Common Core say they are being threatened with “criminal
accountability” if they prevent their children from taking the tests required
by the controversial educational-standards program.
Tamra Hood, a member of South Carolina Parents
Involved in Education, said the state Education Department’s Chief Operating
Officer, Elizabeth Carpentier, warned parents could spend 30 days in jail if
even a single day of testing is missed, Breitbart News reported.
In addition, Hood said Carpentier warned that
groups that encourage parents to refuse the Common Core-aligned tests could be
charged with aiding and abetting a crime.
A memo from South Carolina state education
Superintendent Molly Spearman to districts bluntly declared there is “no
statutory provision for parents to opt their children out of testing.”
Dino Teppara of the state agency’s public
information office denied any threats were made and also denied that Carpentier
said parents can be held criminally liable if they remove their children from
school on testing days, insisting she “simply noted the truancy provisions in
state statutes.”
In any case, Education
Secretary Arne Duncan has clearly warned that if states don’t fix the problem of parents opting out, the
federal government will “have an obligation to step in.”
Despite the insistence of supporters that Common
Core is a state-driven education program, last week Duncan criticized parents
who opt out of testing, charging they are hurting minorities and the disabled.
National
Review Online reported
Duncan’s position is that in the past, English language learners, students in
special education and racial minorities were “swept under the rug.”
“Folks in the civil rights community, folks in
the disability community, they want their kids being assessed. They want to
know if they are making progress or growth,” he said.
In 2013, Duncan chalked up the opposition to
Common Core to “white suburban moms who – all of a sudden – [realize]
their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were, and their school
isn’t quite as good as they thought they were.”
Resistance to Common Core, which has been
adopted by 46 states, is building.
In
Arkansas, a mother confronted
the Arkansas State Board of Education about the program’s absurdly high
demands, a high-school honors
student in New Jersey blasted the testing
publicly and an award-winning
teacher in Ohio told a stunned audience
she’s quitting because of Common Core.
Commenting on the resistance
in New York state, where 184,000 of 1.1 million eligible students refused to
take Common Core English exams earlier this month, renowned educator Diane
Ravitch asked, “What if they threw a test and nobody took it? New York is about
to find out,” the
Long Island Press reported.
Common
Core opponents have leaked a copy of an examination, and a number of states are formally taking
action to withdraw from the requirements.
A
parent in South Carolina, Artie Allen, has a Facebook page encouraging “Stop Common Core in South Carolina.”
He has no sympathy for state and district school
officials fretting over funding-cut threats from the government.
“We got the sob story from one of our 3 kids
schools that we kept our kids home from [testing] today that we could cause
them to lose federal money. Maybe you should have thought about that before you
took the money in the first place!! See what happens when you sleep with the
devil.”
National Review Online pointed out that in
Colorado, which voted for Obama twice, the state board approved a resolution
that districts cannot be punished for test-taking rates, and lawmakers were
working on a bill to protect parents who opt their children out of such tests.
The
Home School Legal Defense Association noted Duncan did not clarify what he meant by “stepping in.”
“Duncan’s statements reflect a growing pressure
on education bureaucrats to keep states locked into the Common Core,” HSLDA
said. “Students nationwide are still opting out of voluntary benchmark
assessments, which are meant to prepare them for all-day Common Core tests.”
HSLDA said it is “concerned that federal
officials will again resort to financial incentives – or threaten to withhold
funding – to coerce students into participating in these tests.”
“As demonstrated empirically by 2009′s ‘Race to
the Top’ grants, state governments have a track record of prioritizing federal
funds over their own sovereignty. Lured by the promise of funding, many
cash-strapped states could not or would not resist the offer of billions of
dollars in exchange for what seemed, at the time, a small sacrifice: adhering
to a set of K-12 learning standards.”
The HSLDA report said that as “grassroots
movements and parental opposition continues to dismantle Common Core piece by
piece, concerned citizens should remain vigilant and take Duncan’s threats
seriously.”
“Whenever the government threatens to ‘step in,’
the right of parents to be involved in their children’s education is bound to
suffer,” the group’s report said.
Commentator
Alex Newman, co-author of a new
book, “Crimes
of the Educators: How Utopians Are Using Government Schools to Destroy
America’s Children,” with Sam Blumenfeld, wrote
recently that the Obama administration “has made no secret of its desire to
control your children’s education from ‘cradle to career,’ as Obama Education
Secretary Arne Duncan often puts it.”
“Top officials have also been very specific in
terms of the radical ideas and values they plan to hammer into the pliable
minds of America’s children.”
The U.S. Department of Education, he noted, says
it is “taking a leadership role in the work of educating the next generation of
green citizens and preparing them to contribute to the workforce through green
jobs.” Duncan boasted in a 2010 speech to a “sustainability” summit.
“Do you send your children to school to get
indoctrinated as ‘green citizens’ so they can have ‘green jobs’? If you are
like most parents, the answer is no,” Newman said.
“But that matters little to the Obama
administration and its extremist allies in ‘education reform’ – the United
Nations, crony capitalists hoping to profit, population-control zealot and
Common Core financier Bill Gates, and the whole corrupt educational
establishment. Using taxpayer-funded bribes, Obama’s Education Department has
been very successful so far in imposing its controversial ‘Common Core’
national standards across most of America.”
http://www.wnd.com/2015/04/state-threatening-anti-common-core-parents-with-jail/
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