Inside the Common Core Racket: “It’s All About the Money”
Written by Michelle Malkin
For the past several years, I’ve reported and tweeted on all the rotten aspects of the federal Common Core “standards” scheme — including dumbed-down curricula, technology boondoggles, intrusive data-mining and tracking, D.C. lobbying groups, corruption of math education, and left-wing indoctrination.
One aspect of the Fed Ed/Big Business alliance that has deserved far greater and deeper media scrutiny is the windfall that huge textbook companies have reaped from “alignment” with the phony government standards.
James O’Keefe and Project Veritas have been doing invaluable work investigating the Common Core racket’s money trail. [This week] O’Keefe and his team expose how a sales rep from one of Pearson’s biggest competitors, Houghton-Mifflin-Harcourt (related: My child’s Common Core-aligned Houghton-Mifflin Algebra book is crap), admitted the company doesn’t care about your kids or their education.
Rank-and-file teachers are also shown in interviews criticizing “the money game.”
Watch:
Partial transcript:
Dianne Barrow, West Coast Sales, Houghton-Mifflin-Harcourt: I hate kids.
PV Journalist: All of this is so new to me. What I have seen is money between, between the publishing companies, the Common Core publishing companies and the schools.
Jodie Cohen, Teacher-Brooklyn, New York: It’s a joke.
PV Journalist: Is that true?
Jodie Cohen, Teacher: It’s bullsh*t and the thing is, what they do is. They create some new f**king system, that f**king sucks to sell more books and then we have to learn something new with the students.
Jodie Cohen, Teacher: So it’s bullsh*t.
Dianne Barrow, West Coast Sales, Houghton-Mifflin-Harcourt: It’s all about the money. What are you crazy? 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.
Kirk Williams, P.S. 140-Bronx, NY: The publishing companies are the winners in this game.
PV Journalist: But is that true that there is money that goes in between?
Jodie Cohen, Teacher, Brooklyn New York: Yeah.
PV Journalist: Between the publishing companies and the school?
Jodie Cohen, Teacher: Oh my god, it’s all a money game. It’s all a money game.
PV Journalist: You seem like you’re in it for the kids though, you seem like you know —
Dianne Barrow, West Coast Sales, Houghton-Mifflin-Harcourt: No, I hate kids.
To date, the GOP presidential candidates have escaped all but cursory, superficial questions about their positions on Common Core. Jeb Bush in particular has gotten away with weasel-worded evasions and platitudes in which he pretends the top-down “standards” scheme was never intended to control and affect curricular decisions at the local level.
I reported on the relationship between GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush’s educational foundation, the Foundation for Excellence in Education, the federally funded testing consortium called PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers)—which raked in $186 million through Race to the Top to develop nationalized tests “aligned” to the top-down Common Core program—and one of the Bush foundation’s behemoth corporate sponsors, educational publishing giant Pearson, extensively here.
If the rest of the journalism world would do its job, the issues raised in Project Veritas investigation (and there are more to come) would be front and center in the presidential debates.
Oh, hey, there’s one coming up on Thursday on Fox Business News.
This article was originally posted at ConservativeReview.com.
Tags: Common Core, Foundation for Excellence in Education, Houghton-Mifflin-Harcourt, Jeb Bush
Education, Federal Elections, Political | David E. Smith | 
January 13, 2016 9:32 AM
