News

Politifact Commits Journalistic Malpractice to Try to Stop our Effectiveness

October, 2013

Congratulations! Our work together to protect the hearts and minds of our children has the corporate and political establishment running scared.  Instead of admitting the truth that Common Core is a grave danger to academic achievement and student, family, and teacher privacy, Politifact ignored extensive documentation sent to them by Dr. Effrem, committed atrocities on the truth, and carried the water for Jeb Bush and Common Core proponents who wish to profit at the expense of our children.
Selectively mentioning only one piece of the detailed and referenced information that Dr. Effrem sent her in response to her inquiry about student privacy, and conflating the responses to two different questions, Amy Sherman tries to dismiss the very real concerns about the political agendas and data privacy concerns inherent in Common Core system of national standards, tests, and data collection. Dr. Effrem's email carefully laid out the issues with many quotes and references:

  1. That the Common Core standards are intended and will be used to teach and instill non-cognitive/psychological attitudes is beyond dispute. (See page 8 of the PDF of this US DOE document for example)
  2. That there is psychological and attitudinal teaching in curriculum and lesson plans aligned to the Common Core is also evident by the type of curriculum aligned to the standards.  (See this lesson tied to specific standards)
  3. Plans to assess psychological traits (p.49) in the Common Core aligned assessments are also abundantly clear.
  4. Despite what the FL DOE says on its website, it is clear that the federal government has a very large role in funding and supervising the development of the national tests for the two multi-state testing consortia, SBAC and PARCC, to the latter of which the state of Florida still belongs even though Governor Scott's order only removed the state from serving as fiscal agent, and whose test, the state is still considering (See Analysis - What Governor Scott's Documents Do and Do Not Accomplish).  The US DOE announcement of the formation of the technical review panel in March of this year indicates that the federal government is involved in supervising the writing of the test questions for the Common Core tests that will include testing of these psychological attitudes and traits.
  5. Finally, PARCC and SBAC have signed memoranda of understanding with US DOE to give them individual, student level data from the assessments, including the psychological data that will be assessed on these tests.
 
Jeff Solochek did the same sort of thing in his emailed question to Dr. Effrem about the role of teachers.  He ignored the facts supplied that there were only five major authors of Common Core, that none of these people had K-12 teaching experience, that there was almost no representation on any of the major committees by K-3 teachers, and that only one quarter of one percent of the alleged 10,000 comments were released to the public.
 
It is because we are being so effective in discrediting the proponents that the willing shills in the media are doing the attack dog work of the corporate and political elite that want to profit enormously at the cost of our children and sneeringly mock your grave concerns.  Don't let them get away with it! Here is what you can do:
  1. Spread this email with the truth to everyone you know, especially your legislators. 
  2. Continue to call, visit and email your legislators in support of Rep. Mayfield's HB 25, and tell them that you want a senate companion bill and a data protection bill. 
  3. Take copies of the detailed emails along with the policy analysis to show how wrong Politifact is about this issue.
  4. Make sure they know that they owe their allegiance to you, their constituents, and not to Jeb Bush or the corporate interests that are trying to ram Common Core down our throats.
  5. Be sure to comment on the problems with specific standards at www.flstandards.org by October 31st.  Specifics are available HERE, HERE, and HERE.
  6. Please support us financially.  We are up against millions of special interest dollars.  Although we have the truth on our side, it takes money to fight these groups, especially the fake conservative ones.
 
Many thanks and God bless you!  


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