Common Core: When Government Assumes the Role of Santa Claus, it Brings Tricks – Not Gifts

By Karen Schroeder

Government is not Santa Claus. Unlike Santa whose bag of gifts is filled by the love and generous spirit of his many helpers, government has nothing to give. To appear benevolent, government takes from good little boys and girls and gives to those whom government considers deserving.

First on government’s list of beneficiaries is government itself and those who keep it in power. Fed by easy access to resources through taxes, they develop an insatiable taste for luxury. In return for promises of great gifts, government demands control of incomes, assets, freedoms, and education belonging to its citizens.

Of these, education is of primary importance because citizens must be convinced from early childhood that good little boys and girls will give up individual selfish dreams and do what government tells them to do. Common Core Standards will help government accomplish that goal. Students living in states that use their right to reject CCS will not escape. They will have to pass college admission tests aligned with CCS curriculum.

Implementation of Common Core Standards costs government millions of dollars acquired through redistribution of wealth. Regional Equity Taxation is being used by the federal government to control property taxes and to undercut state autonomy in education.

The Region and Taxation: School Finance, Cities and the Hope for Regional Reform written for Rutgers by Myron Orfield, explains that “school districts’ traditional reliance on local property taxes has been effectively lessened by state equalization”. That lessening of reliance on property taxes means surrender of local control over education.

Building One America was developed by Mike Kruglik, a community organizer and friend of Barack Obama. He recommends regional tax-based sharing as a method to take money from “well-laden, greedy suburbs” (and schools) and to redistribute those dollars to nearby cities and less-well-off-inner-ring suburbs. According to Stanley Kurtz from Forbes, Kruglik also supports a federal program called Sustainable Communities Initiative which would for case suburbanites out of their cars and into densely packed cities.

Transforming education to promote ideology has been a goal since Benjamin Bloom recommended approaches that educational experts promised would produce superior academic achievement. Promised success did not occur. The result was publication of A Nation at Risk which concluded that a foreign government perpetrating such destruction upon our educational system would have been condemned for committing an act of war. Bloom’s goals included creating a citizenry that would accept a world economy where assets would be taken from rich nations and given to poor nations. Regional equity advocates have similar goals.

The federal government takes a huge tax bite from citizens to develop programs which destroy our freedoms. Educational policies are undermining state autonomy in education, ignoring state statutes governing local control of schools, and violating state laws protecting parental rights to make educational decisions for their children. Regional Equity Taxation will eliminate the ability of parents to finance educational options for their children.

When federal government assumes the role of Santa Claus, it brings a bag of tricks — not gifts.