Common Core Opt-Out Movement GrowingBy TJ Martinell In November 2013, Federal Education Secretary Arne Duncan attributed opposition to Common Core to white suburban moms who discovered that all of a sudden, their child isnt as brilliant as they thought they were and their school isnt quite as good as they thought. Like so many federal bureaucrats, Duncan was dead wrong, as USA News reports the opt-out movement reflects widespread distaste crossing demographic lines: When the opt-out movement first gained traction in 2014, it was initially dismissed by some educational policymakers as a movement primarily taken up by middle-class white families concerned that new standardized tests would reveal their children to be lower-achieving than once thought. Data from New York, for example, suggests that those opting out tended to come from more affluent areas and are more likely to be white. However, data from Ohio have shown a much more inclusive movement, representative of the state population. Early evidence from 2016 suggests that the movement has been gaining momentum in communities of color the Seattle chapter of the NAACP issued a statement in support of opting out, and principals in New York City have publicly voiced support for giving parents the right to opt out. Teachers have also indirectly expressed their opposition to Common Core, emailing parents about how their students can opt out without fear of punishment. In other words, Americans have a variety of reasons to not like Common Core. One more reason is that its an unconstitutional effort by the feds to stick their nose in an issue they have no business trying to manage. Constitutionally, education is an issue that is reserved to the states or the people outside the purview of federal power. Common Core State Standards Initiative is an education initiative that details what K-12 students should know in English language arts and mathematics at the end of each grade. While devised and created by state-level associations, the federal government has driven adoption through an unconstitutional grant program called Race to the Top. Americans can set the stage to end Common Core by contacting their state lawmakers and urging them to introduce withdrawing the state from the program. This would restore education to local control and effectively nullify common core. Its an approach James Madison advised in Federalist #46, in which he wrote a refusal to cooperate with officers of the Union would make federal laws impossible to enforce. But when state legislators refuse to act, individual action can also be an effective strategy. Massive opt-outs create a path forward parents wanting to eliminate Common Core standards and put education back into the hands of state and local bodies where it belongs. Ultimately, if enough students opt out of the testing, it could collapse the Common Core system altogether. Ill keep my fingers crossed hopefully parents ever where will see through this b-a-l-o-n-e-y. Why didnt the article point out common cores Muslim ties? Care to share a link? this Common Core crap is just as useless as the stupid abacus they gave us and then found out it was equal to giving us a calculator and so we became reliant upon that instead of learning. Nothing replaces the basics in education Commie Core is another way to dis-enfranchise kids with obtuse learning methods. These learning methods do not worry about the ANSWER, they worry about the METHOD, and they deliberately confuse and frustrate students across the board. I ran into this way back in the late 1970s with the new math. It is all about dumbing down society harassing children and parents into ridiculous standards that were never meant to improve education in the first place. Imagine demanding that all children learn to read one way ? As long as they can read the text, who cares how they learn, but its a bigger more sinister scheme that must be stopped at all costs. Common Core originates from Education 2000, the UN plan to dumb down the children of the world. It was exposed by Charlotte Iserbyte Thompson in her book The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America. While the no. 2 at the Department of Education in the 1980s, she found out that it was secretly being implemented in the US through the Department of Education. Her book includes the official documents proving this. 