“Common Core is part of the agency to keep true reform from happening in this county,” said Dr. Terrence Moore, author of “The Story Killers: A Common Sense Case Against the Common Core.”
Asked who will benefit, he said, “The people who are not going to profit and thrive are the children. School will become even more boring than it is, and they will be unable to think or have any cultural heritage or moral inheritance to draw upon in order to grow and thrive.”
Instead, Moore said, those who will profit are the progressives pushing this program.
“It’s very clear that [Education Secretary] Arne Duncan and company and the entire progressive left regard schools as their own institutions to turn any way they choose,” he said.
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William Estrada, director of federal relations for the Home School Legal Defense Association, said data-mining, which has sparked parental concern and is prompting legislative action in some states, is a key component of Common Core.
“This really is a gold mine for big business,” Estrada said. “You can see this by who’s profiting from these databases. They see enormous profit in gathering this data in one place.”
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Those who are eager to use these data banks are the companies that are producing Common Core-aligned textbooks and tests. Some, like Neil Bush’s Ignite!Learning, are relative newcomers to the lucrative business of educational publishing and testing. Neil Bush (George and Jeb’s younger brother) raised $23 million from U.S. investors (including his parents), and at least $3 million from Saudi interests to set up Ignite! The company says it develops “easy-to-use teacher-led digital content based instructional systems” that align to “state, Common Core, and local standards.”
Raking in billions of dollars
But the younger Bush’s enterprise is small change compared to the multi-billion-dollar enterprise of Pearson PLC. The British multinational publishing and education company headquartered in London reportedly is the largest education company and the largest book publisher in the world. Pearson has moved like gangbusters into the expanding educational testing and textbook market.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the Thomas B. Fordham Institute estimates the national cost for Common Core compliance will be between $1 billion to $8 billion, and the profits will go almost directly to publishers. Peter Cohen, CEO of Pearson’s K-12 division, Pearson School, stated, “It’s a really big deal. The Common Core Standards are affecting literally every part of the business we’re involved in.”
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But Cohen is not the driving force of Pearson’s School division, which was set up when the company reorganized in May 2013 to accelerate its push into “digital learning, education services, and emerging markets.” The person to watch at Pearson is Sir Michael Barber, chief education adviser to the school division.
Barber, once an adviser to former Prime Minister Tony Blair, is considered a “global expert on education reform and implementation of large-scale system change.” He is also an outspoken supporter of UNESCO’s education goals. (See Part 1 in this series for more information on this topic.)
Unless reforms are “irreversible,” warns Barber, people might undo what’s been done because they will “wish for the past.” Thus he tells policy makers to “work on the culture and the minds of teachers and parents.”
According to Barber, education reform is a “global phenomenon,” no longer to be managed by individuals or sovereign countries. Education reform has “no more frontiers, no more barriers,” he said at a British Education Summit last August.
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Clearly, those who will benefit from Common Core are not the students – America’s children. Rather, hundreds of millions in profits will go to educational textbook and testing companies like Pearson and Microsoft.
One other group will also benefit from the Obama administration’s move to standardize education across the states – the bureaucrats at UNESCO and its associated NGOs. Unless the Common Core takeover of America’s schools is stopped, these bureaucrats and the progressives who shill for them can happily envision an America that is finally becoming the land of the subjugated and the home of the cowering as children are taught to be compliant global citizens.
