** “Teaching materials aligned with the controversial national educational standards ask fifth graders to edit such sentences as ‘The president makes sure the laws of the country are fair,’ ‘The wants of an individual are less important than the well-being of the nation,’ and ‘The commands of government officials must be obeyed by all.’ The sentences, which appear in worksheets published by New Jersey-based Pearson Education, are presented not only for their substance, but also to teach children how to streamline bulky writing.” ~ Perry Chiaramonte, FoxNews.com
** “Policymakers and reform advocates alike have rallied around introducing a set of national content standards, suggesting that this will jump-start the stagnating achievement of U.S. students. As history clearly indicates, simply calling for students to know more is not the same as ensuring they will learn more. Discussions of the Common Core standards are actually sucking all of the air out of the room, distracting attention from any serious efforts to reform our schools.” ~ Eric Hanushek, Hoover Institution at Stanford University
** “It is clear why Arne Duncan [U.S. Secretary of Education] and like-minded reformers favor standardized tests. Along with high-stakes accountability mechanisms, such tests have given policy leaders at the state and federal levels an unprecedented ability to pry open the classroom and control instructional delivery. Equally important to them, standardized tests have yielded a cascade of data that policy elites have assembled into a picture of school quality–constructing evaluative report cards, and even tying student achievement scores to particular teachers as a means of calculating ‘value’ added.” ~ Valerie Strauss, Washington Post
** “U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is now threatening to withhold at least $15 million–and potentially billions more–in federal funds intended for our most challenged students as punishment for California’s deciding what is best for these very same students. He is doing so even as he tries to force California to enforce the No Child Left Behind law that he himself has publicly criticized for failing to achieve its central purpose–to leave no child behind.” ~ Carl A. Cohn, California Board of Education member