The State Collaborative on Reforming Education (SCORE), a group headed by former U.S. Sen. Bill Frist, released a poll showing voters support for the controversial Common Core national standards in the state.
The poll found more than “4 in 10” strongly support the national standards after being read a description of them. The exact question posed to participants was not provided by SCORE, the polling firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, nor the newspaper that wrote a story, DNJ.com.
What the poll proves is that the poll-tested language developed by the proponents of Common Core is working.
Big surprise.
Voters want their schools to do better and they want to get their tax money’s worth. Transferring power and authority to the national level – which is what Common Core implementation is doing – will not achieve that.
Curiously, the two-page pollster’s memo did not provide any results on voters’ opinions of data mining of their children. Either the results were unfavorable or Common Core proponents didn’t even want to know.
As EAGnews reported previously, the data compiled through Common Core will yield all sorts of non-education related information about students for bureaucrats: family income, religious affiliation, discipline problems, number of hours worked per weekend, medical laboratory procedure results, amount of non-school activity involvement, and computer screen name.
How would voters react if they knew an aspect of Common Core is to collect this sort of information on kindergarteners?
Likely not well.
The pro-Common Core forces have all the resources and power in the world to implement national standards with a national curriculum following closely behind.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the biggest single proponent of Common Core outside the federal government, is supporting SCORE. So the limited amount of data released is not surprising.
And those forces will likely win in places like Tennessee because they’re able to shape the message with poll-tested phrases.