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Anti-Common Core ballot initiative clears another hurdle
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Posted Jun. 23, 2016 at 7:05 PM
WORCESTER – A local group looking to scrap the Common Core learning standards in Massachusetts says it has gathered enough signatures to get its question on the state ballot this November.
End Common Core Massachusetts organizers now will have to wait to see if their efforts will even count, as the Supreme Judicial Court weighs a challenge to state Attorney General Maura Healey’s earlier certification of their ballot question.
“I believe we will weather the storm on this one,” said Worcester resident Donna Colorio, who is spearheading the ballot initiative to undo the state’s adoption of the national Common Core standards in 2010.
Ten Massachusetts residents have appealed to the courts to throw out the question, arguing it shouldn’t be eligible for the ballot because it seeks to repeal the actions of a government board, whereas state law requires initiative petitions to propose a new law or constitutional amendment.
After holding oral arguments last month, the court is expected to issue its decision early next month, around the same time when the state will start making up the ballots for the Nov. 8 election. If End Common Core gets a favorable ruling, Ms. Colorio, who is also a member of the Worcester School Committee, said her group has gathered more than 30,000 signatures, well more than the 10,792 it would need to get on the ballot.
Her statewide team of roughly 500 to 700 volunteers collected those names over the past six weeks, staking out grocery stores and other high traffic public places. Since last fall, when ballot question campaigns had to gather 64,750 certified signatures to get approval from the attorney general, Ms. Colorio said, End Common Core expanded its range in the state.
“We had already maxed out in Worcester County,” she said, and in an effort to ensure more proportionately representational signatures, volunteers ventured out to smaller towns. “That was very interesting – (people there) were just as passionate about it.”
End Common Core’s main argument has been that the Common Core standards, which have been adopted by a majority of the states in the U.S., have watered down Massachusetts’s education system, and eroded some of the autonomy local educators have over what gets taught in their classrooms. The standards essentially establish what students must know throughout their education, although advocates on both sides of the issue disagree over how much the Common Core has influenced actual curriculum in public schools.
While the Common Core has been a target for some on the political right, who view it as an instance of centralized government overreach, Ms. Colorio said she believes the debate over the ballot question in Massachusetts won’t be “following any partisan or party lines.” Similarly, she also doesn’t expect the Common Core question to be linked closely to the presidential race, where education has yet to emerge as a major issue.
“I would hope maybe (the Common Core) would come up” during the presidential campaigns, she said, but she expects in Massachusetts it more likely will be local lawmakers who have to weigh in. “I do believe they’re going to have to answer the question – people are going to want to know where they stand on the issue.”
Ms. Colorio also expects another potential ballot question seeking to lift the cap on the number of charter schools that can operate in the state could also help her campaign, as it will pull more voters concerned with education issues into the election.
Once the ballot is ready and the questions are numbered, Ms. Colorio said her team will launch the next phase of its campaign, which will include mass distribution of lawn signs, bumper stickers and push cards.
“I think we’ve done a lot of (education on the issue) already,” she said. “But we still have a lot more to do.”
Standing in opposition to their efforts will be the Committee to Protect Educational Excellence in Massachusetts, which formed earlier this year and is preparing an educational campaign of its own.
“The public does not yet understand the enormous cost to every community or the damaging impact on every student that the repeal will have,” said committee chairman Robert Antonucci, the former state education commissioner and president of Fitchburg State University. “But we are organizing a campaign to make sure they will know by Election Day.”
Both ballot question committees have registered with the state Office of Campaign and Political Finance, but only End Common Core has submitted financial data so far. The group reported a year-end balance for 2015 of $853 back in January, spending $31,476 of $32,155 in revenue over the prior six months.
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Friday, June 24, 2016
Anti-Common Core ballot initiative clears another hurdle
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In my opinion "schooling" and education are two different items. Schooling is done by the State which in our situation is just big corporations that have surrounded the central bank. Common Core is part of "schoolings" efforts to dumb us down. At one time we knew our roots and they are great. Here is Gatto on what is being destroyed by those in charge of "schooling."
ReplyDelete181. Foundations Of The Western Outlook: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Foundations Of The Western Outlook
We will never fully understand American schools until we think long and hard about religion. Whether you are Buddhist, Jew, Moslem, Hindu, Baptist, Confucian, Catholic, Protestant, agnostic, or atheist, this is a hunt for important threads in the tapestry overlooked by secular academic exegesis. More specifically, our quest is for insights of Protestant Christian dissent which have been buried for at least a century, insights which I hope will cause you to look at schools in a different way.
To find out what School seeks to replace, we have to uncover the four pillars which hold up Western society. Two come from the Nordic rim of Europe: the first, a unique belief in the sovereign rights of the individual; the second, what we have come to call scientific vision. Everywhere else but in the West, individual and family were submerged in one or another collective system. Only here were the chips bet on liberty of individual conscience.
The ambition to know everything appears in history in the stories of the Old Norse god Odin, god of Mind and god of Family Destruction, too. No other mythology than the Norse puts pride of intellect together with a license to pry so at the center of things. Science presumes absolute license. Nothing can be forbidden. Science and individualism are the two secular foundations of Western outlook. Our other two supports for social meaning are religious and moral. Both originate in the south of Europe. From this graft of North and South comes the most important intellectual synthesis so far seen on this planet, Western civilization. One of these Mediterranean legs is a specific moral code coming out of the Decalogue, of Judaism working through the Gospels of Christianity. The rules are these:
ReplyDelete1 . Love, care for, and help others.
2. Bear witness to the good.
3. Respect your parents and ancestors.
4. Respect the mysteries; know your place in them.
5. Don't envy.
6. Don't lie or bear false witness.
7. Don't steal.
8. Don't kill.
9. Don't betray your mate.
The fourth and most difficult leg comes from a Christian interpretation of Genesis. It is constituted out of a willing acceptance of certain penalties incurred by eating from the Tree of Knowledge against God's command. The Original Sin. For disobedience, Adam, Eve, and their descendants were sentenced to four punishments.
The first was labor. There was no need to work in Eden, but after the Expulsion, we had to care for ourselves. The second penalty was pain. There was no pain in Eden, but now our weak nature was subject to being led astray, to feeling pain, even from natural acts like childbirth, whether we were good people or bad people. Third was the two-edged free will penalty, including the right to choose Evil which would now lurk everywhere. Recall that in Eden there was exactly one wrong thing to do, eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Now we
Now we thousand would have to endure the stress of constant moral armament against a temptations or of surrendering to sin. Last and most important, the term of human life would be strictly limited. Nobody would escape death. The more you have in wealth, family, community, and friends, the more you are tempted to curse God as you witness yourself day by day losing physical strength, beauty, energy — eventually losing everything.
ReplyDeleteBefore the sixteenth century, the orthodox Christian view was that human nature was equal to carrying this burden. It was weak, but capable of finding strength through faith. This doctrine of inescapable sin, and redemption through personal choice, carries a map of meaning through which to organize one's entire life. Face the inevitable in a spirit of humility and you are saved. This lesser-known side of the Christian curriculum, the one generated out of Original Sin, lacked a Cecil B. DeMille to illustrate its value, but once aware, lives could draw strength and purpose from it.
What I'm calling the Christian curriculum assigns specific duties to men and women. No other system of meaning anywhere, at any time in history, has shown a record of power and endurance like this one, continuously enlarging its influence over all mankind (not just Christians), because it speaks directly to ordinary people without the mediation of elites or priesthoods.
Superficially, you might argue that the success of the West is the result of its guns being better. But really, Western civilization flourished because our story of hope is superior to any other.