Common Core Lies: Enron Revisited

Common Core Fiction

I caught an article last night called “Opening School Data Carries Economic Value, Report Contends” on Education Week, addressing the “ubiquitous flow of data across education has caused anxiety among parents and privacy advocates, who fear that information about students will be released or shared with outside entities without permission.”

America has already proven too smart for the games that Arne and the corporate goons are playing, for, while they try to convince us otherwise, we already know that our fears are not unfounded. Private data gathered via Common Core data mining will be shared without our permission-that’s why they secretly changed FERPA, so that they can.

The article, published in a Bill Gates publication, by the way, proudly boasts of a “new report” that demonstrates that the data mining could “unlock significant economic value by applying advanced analytics to both open and proprietary knowledge.”  If you are able to weed through the jargon, what it boils down to is that they are still trying to convince Americans that the data will be used to “help” us, and that it will enable gaps to be identified and filled, and that everyone will live happily ever after.

There’s just one problem.  It’s not true. It’s more Common Core dishonesty.

The data that Common Core wants to gather has nothing to do with the economic benefit of this country.  Common Core is about  elitist profit and control, and the name of the game is lies and manipulation.

I want to take us back to the creator of the “new report,” McKinsey & Company. McKinsey and Company has a track record of falsifying data to the benefit if its clients. Remember the Enron scandal?  McKinsey and Company built Enron into a mega-corporation–of liars and thieves, and they tried to help them cover their tracks.  Duff McDonald just came out with a new book about McKinsey and Company called “The Firm,” that exposes the nastiness of the McKinsey mob. They are known for falsifying data. Lou Dobbs of Fox Business News says that he cannot find a single example of McKisney’s ability to add value. Neither can I.

When you have some spare time, here is an interesting article about McKinsey and Company’s take on data collection and profits called “How Soon Will Big Data Yield Big Profits?” The title pretty much says it all.

Oh, by the way, David Coleman is an alumnus of McKinsey and Company, and is still affiliated with them. No conflict of interest there…

And now Arne and the corporate goons are relying on them to provide reliable information to sell Common Core?

I want to point out also, that there is extensive evidence that refutes the claim in the “new report.” Christopher Tienken, assistant professor of Education Administration at Seton Hall University, wrote a number of reports based on extensive

Common Core Full of Lies

research and compelling evidence that refutes the claim that data mining is necessary to improve “global competitiveness.” In fact, we are already globally competitive.  Tienken sums this up nicely in his editorial “Common Core State Standards: An Example of Data-less Decision Making“:

The U.S. already has one of the
highest percentages of people with high school
diplomas and college degrees compared to any
other country and we had the greatest number
of 15 year-old students in the world score at the
highest levels on the 2006 PISA science test
(OECD, 2008; OECD, 2009; United Nations,
2010).

We produce more researchers and
scientists and qualified engineers than our
economy can employ, have even more in the
pipeline, and we are one of the most
economically competitive nations on the globe
(Gereffi & Wadhwa, 2005; Lowell, et al., 2009;
Council on Competitiveness, 2007; World
Economic Forum, 2010).

The economic impact that Common Core and its data mining is having is foisting economic burden onto states. $300 million has already been spent on implementing the new assessments, and the cost of implementing Common Core standards themselves will exceed $15 billion.

Fake data, fake report, written to fake us out.

We’re smarter than that.

Related articles

• McKinsey’s Dirty War: Bogus ‘War for Talent’ Was Self-Serving (and Failed) (observer.com)
• Book Review: ‘The Firm’ by Duff McDonald (dinmerican.wordpress.com)
• Six Things the US Dept of Education Did to Deprive Your Child of Privacy
• David Coleman: Architect of the Common Core and, soon, the SAT (isteve.blogspot.com)
• McKinsey Ignores Greed