A mother of three who came to America because of its reputation as a “shining city on a hill” is pleading with her state lawmakers to flee Common Core any way they can, calling it nothing less than the “communist core” she endured while growing up in China.
“Common Core, in my eyes, is the same as the communist core I once saw in China,” Lily Tang Williams told the Colorado state Board of Education recently.
“I grew up under Mao’s regime, and we had the communist-dominated education – nationalized testing, nationalized curriculum and nationalized indoctrination.”
Her testimony was reported by PJMedia, which said she warned against comparing test scores of American children with Chinese students.
“I am telling you, Chinese children are not trained to be independent thinkers,” she said. “They are trained to be massive skilled workers for corporations. And they have no idea what happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989 where government ordered soldiers to shoot its own 1,000 students.”
She wrote about the issue in a commentary posted by the tea-party group Freedomworks.
“We were told to chant everyday in the government run public schools, ‘Long Live Chairman Mao. Long Live Communist Party.’ We were required to write in our [diaries] every day and turn them in for teachers to review. In the [diaries], we were supposed to confess our incorrect thoughts to Mao or do self- criticism, or report anything bad we heard or saw from other students, family, and friends,” she wrote.
“We would memorize Mao’s quotations and recite them aloud during class. For school fun activities, we would dress up as Chinese minority people in their costumes to sing and dance, thanking Mao and the Communist Party [for] saving them from poverty.
“Mao was like a god to me. I would see him rising from the stove fire or talking to me from the clouds,” she said.
In school, she said, teachers had to comply “with all the curriculum and testing requirements, or lose their jobs forever.”
“Parents had no choice at all when it came to what we learned in school.”
And the government would use the various registration procedures to “keep track of its citizens from birth to death.”
Photos were on file, she said, accompanied by details on age, gender, parents, jobs, political class, religion, siblings, home address, grades, awards, punishments, “politically incorrect speeches” and more.
“It was shared by all the government agencies and employers.”
To obtain permission to travel to America, she said, she had to “sign a paper to promise to return to my job.”
“Even though I finally broke the tracking of Chinese government of me by coming to America, I still feel, sometimes, that I am haunted by my file,” she said, explaining today it is “somewhere in a local security or police office.”
“The worst, I fear, is that Common Core could be used by the government and corporations to do data collection and data mining on our children. What else could come to take away more of our rights and privacy? Our freedom is very precious and we must fight to keep it. Without freedom, you are just a slave, no matter how much money you have. Trust me to say this because I have lived under tyranny before and will never want to live in it again,” she said.
See her testimony:
The Common Core State Standards Initiative spells out what K-12 students should know in English language arts and mathematics at the end of each grade. Forty-three states and the District of Columbia have adopted it.
But there are many others who are opposing them.
The Home School Legal Defense Association has released a video of parents testifying, sometimes very emotionally, of how the program has negatively affected their children.
“My older son took the test, did just fine,” said Elaine Coleman, a parent of public school students in New York.
But then her younger son went into third grade.
“Within a month, everything just bottomed out. He didn’t like school anymore. He said he was dumb. He said he was stupid. He didn’t understand anything. I didn’t know what to do help him,” she said.
The video, called “The Parent Interviews,” is a part of the HSLDA’s “Building the Machine.”
The first two states to fully implement the controversial standards were New York and Kentucky.
The documentary addresses the problems found by teachers, students and parents in the Washington-centric program as applied to classrooms.
Filmmaker Ian Reid’s project interviews parents, teachers and a social worker from New York, whose experiences with Common Core are first-hand.
Mary Calamia, a licensed clinical social worker interviewed, said she observed a significant increase in the number of students struggling with anxiety and depression since the Common Core’s implantation in the Empire State.
“What was so upsetting for [the children] was they couldn’t do the work, they feel stupid, they were extremely anxious, [and] extremely distressed about going to school,” she said.
The film is a follow-up to the highly successful documentary “Building the Machine,” which reviewed the creation and implementation of Common Core. It was released in March.
“We were really happy with the response to the ‘Building the Machine’ film. Most viewers felt that it was an excellent primer on the standards and their questionable background, but many also expressed that they wanted a more in-depth look at the Common Core and how the standards have impacted parents and children.” said Reid. “In response to those requests, we’ve put together an additional 20-minute documentary featuring parent interviews from the state of New York and six content-specific episodes that explore issues such as international benchmarking, high-stakes testing, datamining and more.”
Calamia said one student subjected to the new programming carved the word “Stupid” in her wrist.
Parent Christine Barbara reported she thought that her children were being bullied, abused or even molested because of the dramatic change in their personalities.
“I didn’t anticipate [a child] falling apart completely,” she said.
Gwendolyn Britt said Common Core “takes any any teacher’s creativity, takes away children’s creativity.”
“So we can compete globally?” she wondered. “I don’t want to compete globally.”
The documentary includes an interview with David Coleman, College Board president and chief mover behind the change. He explained his officials “could decide what was crucial and what was not.”
He said he’s using data from children as a “force” that moves kids forward.
Even mathematics classes are politicized in the controversial Common Core program for public schools, points out the world’s largest promoter of homeschooling.
WND has published a numerous reports on Common Core, including recently when Common Core curriculum author Jason Zimba admitted the standards don’t provide an adequate mathematics education.
“If you want to take calculus your freshman year in college, you will need to take more mathematics than is in the Common Core,” said Zimba.
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