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Race to the Top Architect Education Secretary Arne Duncan Will Step Down in December

October, 2015




U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is resigning at the end of December.  Over the last six and a half years, Duncan has been the architect of multiple tyrannical federal education policies.  These include:
  • Race to the Top that Dr. Effrem while in Minnesota dubbed in 2010 "Federal Control of Education on Steroids." This never discussed in Congress program required "college and career ready standards," for which Common Core was really the only choice. The standards were adopted mostly by appointed state commissioners and state boards of education instead of votes by elected state legislatures after admitted coercion by USED . The effects of Common Core have been disastrous, because the standards are academically inferior, developmentally inappropriate and psychologically manipulative.  The aligned tests and curriculum funded and supervised by the federal government have violated the constitution and at least three federal laws.  Race to the Top has also given us expanded national preschool and data gathering.
  • Duncan also spread Common Core like a cancer via unconstitutional and illegal conditional waivers to No Child Left Behind.
  • Jeb Bush has been extremely close to and supportive of Duncan in the effort to spread Race to the Top, Common Core, and the elements of Bush's Florida reforms, very similar to the main elements of Race to the Top, across the nation


 
  • Duncan's department was also responsible for severe weakening of the already very outdated Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) that has allowed the federal government and private entities to collect up to ten million data points per child per day sidestepping Congress and proceeding by regulatory fiat.
  • The secretary threatened states with high rates of parents trying to exercise their constitutional rights to control their children's education by opting out of federally mandated state tests.
  • Mr. Duncan also has removed state control of special education alternative assessments that is, according to experts like Dr. Gary Thompson, likely to have disastrous consequences for special education children.
 
Duncan is being replaced by former New York Education Commissioner John King whose tenure in New York imposing the Common Core standards and tests was so controversial that he resigned and was hired by Duncan to be an assistant secretary in the federal department.  King is perhaps most infamous for shutting down a public meeting when he could no longer handle parent anger about the Common Core standards and tests, and then canceling subsequent public meetings. The Washington Post calls him more controversial than Duncan.  King has been appointed as an acting secretary for the remainder of Obama's term so that Obama can again go around Congress and avoid a nomination fight.
 
The effect of Duncan's departure combined with key NCLB architect House Speaker John Boehner's surprise resignation announcement last week on the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) rewrite is unclear.  Much of the education establishment, including the National Education Association and the National Education Association, wrote to the four primary congressional negotiators saying that it was important to pass something this session of Congress. There are many others including Duncan himself last week after Boehner's announcement, that are pessimistic that a deal can be finished but, there are others that say that these leaders should not stop negotiating and push something through as a legacy.   The Florida Stop Common Core Coalition, joining groups across the nation, believes that anything that Democrats and this president would accept, given everything described above would seal Common Core and the related programs into place with little hope of returning education to parental or local control. 


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