Amnesty and Common Core: Two Sides of the Same Coin – Part I

Is there any wonder why the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R), Microsoft founder Bill Gates, and scores of elites from both political parties are ardent champions of both amnesty for illegal immigrants and the Common Core centralized educational standards?

Both issues are related, have been enmeshed for years in the progressive agenda that includes labor and education, and could be close to being fully realized were it not for grassroots groups of Americans joining together against the status quo of government, corporate, and education elites.

Many church organizations, including the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference (NHCLC), have also come out in favor of both amnesty legislation for illegal immigrants and the Common Core standards.

Approximately 100 Catholic dioceses have embraced the centralized learning standards as well, at the same time that many U.S. and Mexican Catholic bishops have championed the cause of amnesty legislation.

Most recently, archbishop of New York and former president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) Cardinal Timothy Dolan said on CBS’s Face the Nation that he liked former Gov. Jeb Bush “a lot,” particularly his positions on immigration and education.

Breitbart News spoke with the archdiocese of New York’s communications director Joseph Zwilling about Dolan’s comments, particularly whether the cardinal’s approval of Bush’s policies on “education” included the latter’s ardent support for the Common Core standards.

“I don’t know if Cardinal Dolan is aware of Mr. Bush’s support of Common Core,” said Zwilling, “but I know that Dr. Timothy McNiff, superintendent of schools for the archdiocese, has adopted the Common Core, and that Cardinal Dolan supports Dr. McNiff.”

The relationship between Common Core and amnesty could readily be seen in the economic justice goals of Common Core as presented by David Coleman, both the “architect” of Common Core and the current College Board president.

As Breitbart News reported on February 3rd, Coleman announced last May that he would be bringing into the student data collection effort, for Common Core and the College Board, members of Barack Obama’s Organizing for Action (OFA) team, including Dan Wagner and Jeremy Bird, to reach out to low-income and Latino students, whom Coleman referred to as “low-hanging fruit.”

Connecting to the popular Common Core supporter claim that the centralized standards are “rigorous,” Coleman’s social engineering project at the College Board, “Access to Rigor,” is aimed at profiling low-income and Latino K-12 students, and then mobilizing them–the same tactics used by the OFA team to successfully re-elect Obama in 2012.

It is the student data collection aspect of Common Core, in fact, that is the basis of the relationship between Common Core and amnesty, and it is a relationship that took solid shape in the 1990’s.

Marc Tucker, president of the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE) was involved in the early stages of what would become Common Core and proposed his agenda to Hillary Clinton immediately following Bill Clinton’s election to the presidency in November of 1992. In his now well-known “letter to Hillary Clinton,” Tucker wrote:

I still cannot believe you won. But utter delight that you did pervades all the circles in which I move…

The subject we were discussing was what you and Bill should do now about education, training and labor market policy…

Our purpose in these meetings was to propose concrete actions that the Clinton administration could take — between now and the inauguration, in the first 100 days and beyond. The result, from where I sit, was really exciting. We took a very large leap forward in terms of how to advance the agenda on which you and we have all been working — a practical plan for putting all the major components of the system in place within four years, by the time Bill has to run again.

We think the great opportunity you have is to remold the entire American system for human resources development, almost all of the current components of which were put in place before World War II. The danger is that each of the ideas that Bill advanced in the campaign in the area of education and training could be translated individually in the ordinary course of governing into a legislative proposal and enacted as a program. This is the plan of least resistance. But it will lead to these programs being grafted onto the present system, not to a new system, and the opportunity will have been lost. If this sense of time and place is correct, it is essential that the administration’s efforts be guided by a consistent vision of what it wants to accomplish in the field of human resource development, with respect both to choice of key officials and the program.

Tucker continued with a description of his “vision of the kind of national – not federal – human resources development system the nation could have.”

He wrote:

This is interwoven with a new approach to governing that should inform that vision. What is essential is that we create a seamless web of opportunities, to develop one’s skills that literally extends from cradle to grave and is the same system for everyone — young and old, poor and rich, worker and full-time student. It needs to be a system driven by client needs (not agency regulations or the needs of the organization providing the services), guided by clear standards that define the stages of the system for the people who progress through it, and regulated on the basis of outcomes that providers produce for their clients, not inputs into the system.

As the Eagle Forum observes, Tucker’s plan was implemented in three laws passed by Congress and signed by President Clinton in 1994: the Goals 2000 Act, the School-to-Work Act, and the reauthorized Elementary and Secondary Education Act. These new laws established the following mechanisms to restructure the public schools:

1. Bypass all elected officials on school boards and in state legislatures by making federal funds flow to the Governor and his appointees on workforce development boards.
2. Use a computer database, a.k.a. “a labor market information system,” into which school personnel would scan all information about every schoolchild and his family, identified by the child’s social security number: academic, medical, mental, psychological, behavioral, and interrogations by counselors. The computerized data would be available to the school, the government, and future employers.
3. Use “national standards” and “national testing” to cement national control of tests, assessments, school honors and rewards, financial aid, and the Certificate of Initial Mastery (CIM), which is designed to replace the high school diploma.

As the Eagle Forum notes, the Tucker plan is to train children in specific jobs to serve the workforce and the global economy rather than educate them so they can make their own life choices.

Stay tuned for Part II of “Amnesty and Common Core: Two Sides Of The Same Coin.”