INCH still opposes Common Core:
Your voices are being heard, our friends in the legislature have been inundated with your calls and emails asking them to continue defunding Common Core. However, the proponents are still seeking an amiable solution for making funding possible.
The latest effort has been an inclusion within the current resolution to exclude home schoolers from having to take the required Common Core testing of the public schools. The exclusionary language is the same already in use within Michigan law that excludes home educators from public school requirements.
However, INCH has never been against Common Core primarily because of new educational testing requirements. Home schoolers have always done very well when tested against their peers at every level.
The fundamental problem INCH has with Common Core is with its foundation of nationalized standardization of education both in assessment and in process. While proponents continue to argue state control exists we believe eventually federal control will occur and once the federal government is responsible for the education of the nation freedom to home school will no longer exist anywhere.
Second, higher standards will not help any state develop smarter students. Home schoolers, private schoolers and suburban schoolers all out perform inner city schoolers substantially universally. All of the students who do well in testing have in common parents who are concerned about their children’s educational performance from kindergarten through high school and they work to ensure their child’s success. This parental involvement is sorely lacking in the inner city and will not be effected by Common Core. The problem with poor performance is moral not academic. If lawmakers really want to increase academic performance they will address the issues destroying the family in the inner city, then educational performance will improve.
Third, the means for teaching to the Common Core standards are more godless and immoral than ever before. Already American History has been and continues to be rewritten but Common Core takes the agenda against our Christian founding to a new level. The same can be said of English, Science and Social Studies. This liberal/progressive educational philosophy, we believe, will make our nation increasingly more ignorant of our founder’s moral, economic, government and social beliefs that caused them to give their life, fortunes and sacred honor to our founding in the first place.
While our friends who support Common Core see this as an opportunity to hold accountable those who have long been in power over the public school venue, INCH believes Common Core is not the appropriate means for making this happen. We believe our nation desperately needs a return to our Judeo-Christian heritage, currently not allowed to be taught in the public school system, which is why we home school in the first place.
Common Core will not help us get closer to meeting this need but will take the entire nation further away from this goal and therefore we oppose all efforts to fund or implement Common Core.
Please continue to make your voices heard in opposition to Common Core with your state Senator and Representative.
Mike Winter
INCH Executive Director