Education

Homeschooling advocate: Common Core abandons classics for ‘reading executive orders from President Obama’

Ginni Thomas Contributor
Font Size:

Will Estrada, the director of federal relations for the Home School Legal Defense Association, says classics are being abandoned in the standards of the Common Core State Standards Initiative.

“We’ve started seeing what is in this Common Core curriculum, and it’s not good, Ginni,” the 29-year-old told The Daily Caller’s Ginni Thomas.

“I mean, you have the classics being abandoned for instead reading executive orders from President Obama. What is up with this? Why are we leaving ‘Grapes of Wrath’ and, you know, ‘1984’ to instead read executive orders from the president.”

The Common Core State Standards Initiative was an effort initiated in 2009 by the National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers to create national curriculum standards for K-12 education. Subsequently, the U.S. Department of Education incentivized the adoption of Common Core Standards through its Race to the Top program. To date, all but five states have adopted the Common Core State Standards Initiative.

Estrada says the Common Core curriculum allows for the teaching of a worldview which places the United Nations above the American Constitution.

“You know the worldview that’s being taught in the Common Core? It is the United Nations is better than our Constitution and our Declaration of Independence,” he said.

But what alarms him the most is that the federal government won’t simply stop with advocating for national curriculum standards.

“It never stops at standards,” he said. “You next have national curriculum, national testing and national databases and that’s where the real controversy is coming.”

Finding each other on Facebook and other social media, activists across the country are organizing to repeal their state’s adoption of Common Core, however.

Throughout the week, TheDC will present more of Thomas’s interview with Estrada, one of America’s leading homeschooling advocates. In the interview segments, Estrada discusses looming UN Treaties that he says pack more than their titles suggest, provides his reaction to MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry challenging the primacy of parental responsibility of children and more.

Mrs. Thomas does not necessarily support or endorse the products, services or positions promoted in any advertisement contained herein, and does not have control over or receive compensation from any advertiser.

Ginni Thomas