Fake News, Common Core and How Parents Are STILL Getting Thrown Under the Media Bus
From 2010 to 2014 – for four consecutive years – I researched and wrote about, lobbied against, designed memes until my hard drive nearly crashed, and crisscrossed virtually the entire state on speaking tours, appealing to as many people as I could to stop the implementation of the Common Core State Standards in Oklahoma. Ultimately our little Common Core is not OK band ‘won,’ and the Standards were repealed from state law in 2014 during a campaign that captured national attention.
Today the simple lack of time (stemming from homeschooling four kids, teaching Chem 1 and Pre-Algebra at our Co-Op, running a small farm and needing at least 6 hours of sleep) has pared my education policy involvement down to research and writing on the side. When I saw an article loudly proclaiming “New Research Shows How Common Core Critics Built Social Media ‘Botnets’ to Skew the Education Debate,” listed in my daily “Common Core” Google Alert, however, I stopped everything I was doing to absorb each condescending word.
Imagine my surprise when I learned from ‘The 74′ – a “news site covering education in America” partially ‘supported’ by the premier Common Core Apologist Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, that a study was done at the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE – adding ‘education’ was necessary; otherwise it just would have been CPR, which, come to think of it, the study badly needs) at the University of Pennsylvania, “…suggests public animosity toward Common Core was manipulated – and exaggerated – by organized online communities using cutting-edge social media strategies.”
I have to admit, the story intrigued me – none in our group were savvy Twitter users, yet we had been able to put the kibosh on Common Core in Oklahoma – so I clicked the link to the study in the article. Immediately I was sent to a website so slick it took over a minute to load (shocker here, the study was underwritten in part by….wait on it….Bill Gates) which told me I could use it interactively to “tell the story of the Common Core debate on Twitter.”
Gates-Funded Echo Chamber Amplifies Meaningless Mantras
Unwilling to sit twiddling my thumbs while the website loaded, and pretty much knowing what I would find when it did, I went back to finish reading the 74 article. To my amazement, I discovered that a group of ‘right-wing’ conservatives had banded together to take over Twitter and riddle it with ‘Twitterbots.’ I imagine this must look like a massive infestation of the terrifying Tooth Fairies from HellBoy 2 – spewing out ‘fake news’ messages against Common Core into the Twittersphere, ‘drowning out’ and ‘supplanting’ messages from the likes of ‘teachers and think tank experts.’
Thanks in no small part to the fact that the Bill Gates Common Core echo chamber has underwritten so much of today’s American education policy network, the #CommonCore study hit the news cycle with force. It found its way back to me numerous times through such venues as Fake News, Common Core and How Parents Are STILL Getting Thrown Under the Media Bus | Truth in American Education:
