Is that worse than Harvard-educated Obama saying "corpsman" and not realizing the "p" and "s" are silent? Or when he thought there were 57 Unites States? How about Sacajawea Warren and her continued phony claims that she's part American Indian? Anyway, I digress and your post is funny. I already said I thought DeVos was a bad choice. But you know why someone like her got picked? Because she's an "outsider" who is willing to listen to parents about education. She's the exact opposite of John King. King is an unapologetic proponent of the Common Core, student data collection, and Common Core testing. In early 2011, he made a series of fourteen videos with Common Core author, David Coleman. His efforts then focused on the creation of a K-12 curriculum. New York State was the only state that used its federal Race to the Top dollars to develop Common Core curriculum— spending in excess of $28,000,000. According to reporter Jessica Bakeman, then of the news agency, Capitol New York, Common Core Inc. was awarded three large contracts from NYSED to develop math curriculum: $3,323,732 for K-2 curriculum, $2,715,958 for 3-5, and $8,108,919 for Grades 6-12. That is a total of $14,148,609 or more than $1,000,000 per grade level project. Equivalent sums were spent on the development of a curriculum in English Language Arts with other vendors. New York State’s efforts to build a Common Core curriculum with federal tax dollars were praised by the Fordham Foundation, which receives funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to promote the Common Core. Fordham described the effort as creating “a nearly complete set of curricular materials for math and ELA.” Fordham dubbed the curriculum the “Common Core’s breakout hit”, promoting it as free curriculum that can be used across the country...... Within New York, however, the curriculum was a “breakout flop.” Teaching strategies, often presented as scripts, were confusing. The time allotted for each lesson was longer than the instructional time allotted by most districts, resulting in rushed pacing. There were confusing worksheets that parents and teachers could not understand. The English Language Arts curriculum had a hyper focus on close reading, and adhered to the Common Core quotas for informational text. For example, the fifth-grade curriculum devotes 11 days to students reading the complexUnited Nations Declaration of Human Rights. Romeo and Juliet, which has been a classic part of ninth-grade English curriculum in most high schools, was reduced to excerpted readings in the modules, crowded out by non-fiction, which included Wizard of Lies: the Life of Bernie Madoff. Districts with limited resources and low test scores demanded that teachers adhere to the modules and never veer. Teacher concern and frustration rose. In suburban schools, parents were up in arms. King’s education department continued to promote the curriculum, and push staff development as the solution to the angst. Parent complaints were not limited to Common Core curriculum. Another component of the Race to the Top package was participation in the creation of a student database called inBloom, a 100 million dollar investment of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation. King stonewalled for years, refusing to tell parents, school board members and superintendents what student data would be shared with inBloom, which planned to amass an extraordinary amount of confidential student data, with the intent of sharing it with private software developers to create educational products.
O...M...G. She is a liar, plain and simple. Elizabeth Warren is not a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. Elizabeth Warren is not enrolled in the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. And Elizabeth Warren is not one of the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee. Nor could she become one, even if she wanted to. Despite a nearly three week flap over her claim of "being Native American," the progressive consumer advocate has been unable to point to evidence of Native heritage except for a unsubstantiated thirdhand report that she might be 1/32 Cherokee. Even if it could be proven, it wouldn't qualify her to be a member of a tribe: Contrary to assertions in outlets from The New York Times to Mother Jones that having 1/32 Cherokee ancestry is "sufficient for tribal citizenship," "Indian enough" for "the Cherokee Nation," and "not a deal-breaker," Warren would not be eligible to become a member of any of the three federally recognized Cherokee tribes based on the evidence so far surfaced by independent genealogists about her ancestry..... These are my family stories," Warren has said. "This is what my brothers and I were told by my mom and my dad, my mammaw and my pappaw." But so far she and her campaign have been unable to establish that her family lore about being part Native American is anything more than one of the most widely shared family myths known to American genealogical researchers, myths especially prevalent in Warren's home state of Oklahoma, the state with the highest percent of Native Americans in the nation and one where the Cherokee are the largest minority group. And let's not forget she used those lies to her benefit professionally.
