News

Executive of Textbook Publisher Supporting Bush Foundation Admits Common Core is a Crony Capitalist Scheme

January, 2016

A stunning new Project Veritas undercover video documents what parents and activists have been saying for many years. Common Core is not at all about raising academic performance and excellence for children.  It is about making money for textbook publishers. In this short video, now fired Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) executive, Dianne Barrow, admits:

• She "hates kids," and she's "in it to sell books. Don't even kid yourselves for a heartbeat."
•  "It's all about the money."
• "You don't think that the educational publishing companies are in it for education do you? No, they're in it for the money."
• "She has worked for textbook giant Pearson; "everyone has worked for Pearson. They own the world. You know? They just do underhanded things."
• "The fact that they have to align the educational standards is what they have to do to sell the books."
• "Well, they [publishers] can't sell anything unless it's aligned to Common Core."
• "They [publishers] didn't lobby for them [standards] to be put in place, but they lobby but now they go after the money."

Here is the entire video:
 
 
One of the important ways publishers like Houghton Mifflin and Pearson  "go after the money" is supporting former Florida Governor Jeb Bush's now former foundation, The Foundation for Excellence in Education (FEE). As shown in the screen shots below, both HMH and Pearson have contributed substantially to FEE and its annual national summit. The Washington Post chronicled how FEE paid for legislators' expenses to attend these meetings where corporate lobbyists had full access to the legislators. As has been extensively documented by writers and researchers like Michelle Malkin and Breitbart's Dr. Susan Berry, as well as other organizations like In the Public Interest, after these large donations and the summits, FEE often lobbied for legislation or policy that would help these companies.  


Bush's support for Common Core and for the tyrannical Every Student Succeeds Act has cost him dearly in the presidential primary. Despite his claim and that of Senator Lamar Alexander that Common Core is "over as an issue in a federal race," parents and activists remain furious at Bush and other establishment candidates who do or did support Common Core, like John Kasich, Chris Christie, and Mike Huckabee, all of whose poll numbers are even worse than Bush's nationally. After spending over $60 million, the best polling performance Bush has had recently is a breathless report by the media that he is in second place in New Hampshire. In reality, he is ahead of John Kasich by 0.1 percentage point and in a five-way tie with Kasich, Christie, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio for second place within the poll's 4.1% margin of error, meaning he could in reality be in 6^th place in that poll as he is in the latest Monmouth poll released yesterday showing him in 6^th place at four percent.  Bush is also in 6^th place in the RCP average for New Hampshire. Nationally, Bush has slipped to 6^th place in the RCP average with 3.8%. He is indeed as portrayed by the political cartoon website Grrrgraphics, the "Incredible Shrinking Jeb." This is thanks to you, the parents of America making clear that they will not support presidential candidates supporting the destruction of the lives, futures, and privacy of their children with Common Core and its associated psychological profiling and data mining.  Thank you! Fight on!

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