Parents vs. Unelected Education Bureaucrats: Who Wins?

With ongoing controversy surrounding Common Core teaching Islam, soft porn, non-math, collecting behavioral aptitude data, poor standardized testing, education designed solely correlated to test scores, and non-transparency, and increasing national failing test scores, parents are demanding that Common Core be abolished.

From organizing state coalitions, to active social media, online petitions, and public protest campaigns that urge parents to opting out their children from Common Core testing, parents are fighting back or removing their children from public school altogether.

Parents have created grassroots organizations from Nevada Parents & Teachers STOP CommonCore to Houston-based Stop the Magnet, Stop Common Core in Iowa, Florida’s Stop Common Core Coalition, and  national activist groups like Women on the Wall and Voices Empower. Outraged and concerned parents are saying no to a non-American data capturing program designed by the governments of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Libya that inhibits any actual learning of American children.

Parents’ reasoning is simple: Common Core and the U.S. Department of Education are both unconstitutional.

One parent urges everyone to sign a petition to defund the U.S. Department of Education. She says, “Don’t be afraid. We must stop the insanity. We must stop fighting the elephant in the room. We must get up off our knees and address the REAL problem. Defund the U. S. Department of Education.”

The petition reads:

WHEREAS; the US Department of Education is an unconstitutional federal agency and;

WHEREAS; the quality of education in America has been on steady decline with a huge increase in cost since the creation of the US Department of Education in 1979 and;

WHEREAS; the American people feel educating our children is the God given right of parents at the local level. Not the state or the federal government

We hereby attest and affirm that WE THE PEOPLE of the United States demand that the U. S. Department of Education be defunded and disbanded by the US Congress as soon as possible. We demand this gradual transition be started immediately and completed by the year 2020.

It requires 100,000 signatures by October 1, 2015.

State bureaucrats are increasingly finding themselves under fire both legally and in the media. In New York, parents opted out roughly 20 percent of children in the third through eight grade from math and English tests.

In response, New York State’s Education Commissioner MaryEllen Elia suggested “ramifications” might be taken, noting that she was assembling a legal team and initiating a public relations tour to educate various communities about “following the law.” She’s since backtracked on her position, which still remains unclear.

New York State Education Department spokesman Jonathan Burman also mentioned ramifications for school districts. He told Chalkbeat New York, the “the feds are discussing the possibility of imposing penalties for failing to hit participation rate targets.” And New York State is “consider[ing] imposing sanctions” on school districts that don’t meet the 95 percent threshold, including withholding funds.

Nevada parents are already facing a battle in court to defend their constitutional right to choose where to send their child to school in response to unelected state bureaucrats who have prevented them from doing so.

This spring at an Education Writers Association Conference, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan implied that the federal government would require states to require students to take Common Core standardized tests. If states do not meet the required Common Core testing threshold he remarked, “If states don’t do that, then we have an obligation to step in.”

Contrary to state and federal bureaucratic assertions, parents have a constitutional right to reject all state and federal violations of their rights to educate their children without state interference. 

This article was first published on September 2, 2015.