Common Core In-Sync with American Humanist Association’s 10 Guiding Principles for Teaching Values

By Danette Clark

(Updated — originally posted June 28, 2013)

For those who still deny the secular progressive agenda behind the Common Core State Standards, the American Humanist Association (AHA) provides a nice little check-list of ‘guiding principles’ they believe should be taught to all children in all schools.

AHA’s Ten Commitments: Guiding Principles for Teaching Values in America’s Public Schools express the importance of moral/character education with a focus on, among other things, critical thinking, global citizenship, human rights, social justice, and service learning.

So how do our new national standards and aligned curriculum resources measure up to these guiding principles? Not only does Common Core get an A plus, Common Core assessment creator and validation committee member, Linda Darling-Hammond, is an endorser of AHA’s Ten Commitments.

Although not dated, it appears AHA released their Ten Commitments in 2012. Therefore, Darling-Hammond’s endorsement of them came after she signed off on Common Core.

The American Humanist Association, whose motto is ‘Good Without God’, makes clear their belief that it’s not just a school’s right, but its duty, to see that students develop the convictions needed to shape a ‘democratic’ and ‘just world’.

From AHA’s website:

“Many students spend as much or more time in school than they do at home. Therefore, the school must be a place that supports family and community efforts to build strong values.”

“This ethical mission is an essential part of all education, public and private, elementary through high school and university.  In a democratic and pluralist society, we believe that the values presented should be the moral foundation of education.”

As with many Common Core lessons, AHA calls for students to learn about real world problems and injustices — ‘real world problems’ that, more often than not, are sensitive political and social issues that should not be addressed in school and certainly have nothing to do with a quality education.

Lesson plans and resources created by Common Core partner organizations, Asia Society, Pearson Education, Discovery Education, Expeditionary Learning, Crayola, and more, fall right in line with AHA’s vision of morality in education, while the English Language Arts standards themselves, through the heavy use of informational texts (propaganda), lay the perfect foundation for social engineering as called for by John Dewey, a drafter of the Humanist Manifesto.

David Coleman, dubbed ‘the architect’ of the standards, was in recent years a symposium speaker and participant in the IAS School of Social Science Dewey Seminar, where participants examine, through a series of workshops and seminars, “the impact of educational institutions on society, sociopolitical orders, and democracy”.

For AHA to say they support family and community efforts to build values in one breath, then specifically lay out what those values should be in another, tells us exactly what we need to know — that AHA educators intend to teach their values, regardless of whether they conflict with the values of the parent. But so it is and has always been with the secular progressive education movement…Constitution be damned.

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Common Core ‘Architect’ David Coleman’s History With the Ayers and Obama Led Chicago Annenberg Challenge

By Danette Clark

Re-post. Original posted June 17, 2013. Also found at EAGnews.org.

Referred to as ‘Common Core lead standards authors’ by the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), David Coleman and Jason Zimba are just two in a long list of Common Core creators whose academic roots are with the education-for-a-revolution machine borne by Annenberg Institute, Carnegie Corporation, Bill Gates, et al.

Today, Coleman and Zimba are head of Student Achievement Partners, an organization that played a leading role in developing the standards and actively supports districts and states in implementing them.

Prior to Student Achiement Partners, Coleman and Zimba were co-founders of the Grow Network (now owned by McGraw-Hill Company). Grow Network began as a pilot program in New York in 2000. Less than a year later, the Chicago Public Education Fund began negotiating a contract with Grow Network on behalf of Chicago Public Schools.

The Chicago Public Education Fund (‘The Fund’) was created in 1998 by the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) board of directors, which included Barack Obama as board chairman and communist Bill Ayers, as co-chair.

President Obama’s recently appointed Commerce Secretary, Penny Pritzker, was one of twelve founding board members appointed to The Fund.

Obama himself worked with The Fund for the next several years as a leadership council member, along side Bill Ayers’ father, Thomas Ayers, and brother, John Ayers.

From Catalyst Chicago, March 2000:

“The Chicago Annenberg Challenge will close up shop in June 2001, but its efforts to improve public education will live on through a new community foundation…the Chicago Public Education Fund…”

The Fund existed and still exists to carry on the work of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge — that work being the expansion of Theodore Sizer’s Coalition of Essential Schools, the reform movement that now (even absent Common Core) indoctrinates students in several states and districts nationwide with a Marxist-Communist political, moral and social ideology.

In 2001, shortly after Arne Duncan began his stint as CEO of Chicago Public Schools (CPS), David Coleman’s newly formed Grow Network solidified its $2.2 million contract with CPS to provide the district with data driven student performance reports for the 2002-2003 school year.

In CPS’s 2002 Education Plan, which introduced Grow Network as a new initiative, President Obama is listed as a member of the district’s planning and development advisory committee. The report also names John Ayers and Communist-Maoist Mike Klonsky of Bill Ayers’ Small Schools Workshop as participants in CPS’s education plan discussion groups.

In 2004, Coleman and Zimba sold Grow Network to McGraw Hill, which continues its lucrative partnership with CPS today. In fact, two former Grow Network members now work for the Chicago Public Education Fund — one of them as its managing director.

The fact that Grow Network has history with the Ayers/Obama/Annenberg led Chicago school system, and was recruited by the Ayers/Obama/Annenberg created Chicago Public Education Fund, doesn’t necessarily implicate David Coleman and Jason Zimba as supporters of Chicago’s radically progressive style of education. However, given Coleman’s progressive upbringing and the fact that CPS paid more than $2 million to bring his untested and unproven program to the district, it does seem likely that Coleman and Zimba had prior connections to the Chicago ed machine.

Fast forward to today and we see each of these players still working to expand the Annenberg/Coalition of Essential Schools (CES) reform model, a model whose teaching strategies, lesson plans, and curriculum resources are identical to those now being used with Common Core.

Communist, domestic terrorist, and creator of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, Bill Ayers, continues to speak on behalf of the Annenberg/CES reform effort and provides professional development to teachers and principals from CES schools and districts.

From the White House, Obama and Duncan promote, by name, Bill Ayers’ Small Schools Workshop and the Coalition of Essential Schools while funneling billions to states that have adopted Common Core.

Carnegie Corporation, which has continued to support Annenberg/CES reform over the years, now also provides heavy funding to the Council of Chief State School Officers for the creation and implementation of Common Core.

Common Core Partner Organization Employs Author of Anti-Semitic Book Used in Tennessee Schools

By Danette Clark

Pearson, the education service company widely known for publishing textbooks, partners with the Council of Chief State School Officers to provide training and other resources to states implementing the nationally proposed Common Core State Standards.

In addition to employing Grant Wiggins, a curriculum ‘expert’ who had a hand in the design of the pro-communist CSCOPE curriculum, Pearson also employs James Rubenstein, author of The Cultural Landscape: An Introduction to Human Geography.

The Blaze.com reported Wednesday that parents in Tennessee’s Williamson County School District are calling for the removal of Rubenstein’s book because of its anti-semitic content.

As reported by TheBlaze:

“…the book… contains the question, “If a Palestinian suicide bomber kills several dozen Israeli teenagers in a Jerusalem restaurant, is that an act of terrorism or wartime retaliation against Israeli government policies and army actions?”

The book also describes Hamas and Hezbollah as ‘political parties’ rather than terrorist groups.

Pearson’s website offers free virtual conferences for Social Studies teachers and live access to ‘experts’, including James Rubenstein, whom Pearson says “will help high school teachers understand best practices for teaching the economic geography component and cultural elements of a human geography course”.

Rubenstein’s book is used as a resource for Advanced Placement (AP) Human Geography courses. The Advanced Placement program is administered by College Board and was intended to provide a pathway for students to attend college.

College Board, which has leaned to the far left for many years, recently appointed the ‘architect’ of Common Core, David Coleman, to be its 9th president.

As an affiliate organization of the Coalition of Essential Schools (CES), the radical  indoctrination movement behind both CSCOPE and Common Core, College Board posted job announcements on CES’s website in search of teachers for several College Board Schools opened in New York City.

College Board Schools are social justice schools created in partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation.

When an organization or school posts a job announcement on the CES national job board, it means they are looking for progressive educators who abide by the principles and practices of the Coalition of Essential Schools.

Read about CES indoctrination practices at CSCOPE Curriculum Designer Employed by CCSSO Partner to Aid in Implementing Common Core and ‘Was George Washington Any Different From Palestinian Terrorists…?’.

As publisher of books authored by the likes of James Rubenstein and Grant Wiggins, Pearson knows exactly what kind of material they are endorsing and distributing.

Likewise, on the receiving end, Williamson County Schools Assistant Superintendent Tim Gaddis also knows exactly what content his district uses and what purpose will be served by students ‘critically thinking’ about questions like the one found in Rubenstein’s book.

Gaddis, who defended the text, formerly served as Chief Operating Officer of  Modern Red Schoolhouse in Nashville, Tennessee.

Modern Red Schoolhouse is one of seven organizations that make up the Coalition for Comprehensive School Improvement (CCSI). All seven  organizations closely partner with the Coalition of Essential Schools.

For example, CCSI member, ATLAS Communities, was created through a  partnership between progressive reformers, James Comer and Howard Gardner, and Coalition of Essential Schools founder, Theodore Sizer.

See the faces behind the Coalition of Essential Schools (thereby also behind CSCOPE and Common Core) at Name Names.