Georgia Campaign for Liberty gave candidates for Bartow County Board of Education seats an opportunity to provide straight answers to the following questions. The candidates’ answers can be seen below the list of questions.

Survey Questions

The U.S. Constitution delegates no power over education to the Federal government. The development of Common Core standards was led by the National Governor’s Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), both Washington DC-based special interest groups. States were coerced by the federal government to accept the standards as part of the stimulus package. State school boards, whose members are appointed (not elected) submitted the applications. These appointed bureaucrats decided to implement Common Core without ever having seen the completed standards and without any electoral recourse for parents and voters. Under this progressive education ideology, our nation’s children fell to 19th out of 21 nations in Math, 16th in Science, and to dead last in Physics according to the Third International Math and Science Study. In an attempt to dodge the ire of dissatisfied parents, legislators have begun rebranding Common Core.

1. Will you vote to repeal use of destructive Common Core Standards in our schools?

Private property, freedom, and economic prosperity are inseparable. The U.S. has led the world in wealth, standard of living, and abundance in the past because individuals had the ability to invest and produce capital. The U.S. created a very easy, immediate system for securing ownership of private property. Redistribution of wealth however, leads to welfare, dependency, and poverty. Despite claims by our school board that 61.2% of our students are considered “economically disadvantaged,” property taxes have been raised consistently in Bartow County, crippling the very families upon whom children depend the most.

2. Do you support property rights as crucial to our country’s freedom and ability to build wealth, and will you vote consistently to lower property taxes?

Competition in the free market produces better options at lower prices. Whereas parents are the most judicious overseers of their children’s education, parents should have options in education. The federal government has created a monopoly in education, and spending is having an adverse impact on academic achievement. Rather than being held accountable for its failure and abuse of power, government is attempting to redefine education to benefit itself and private foundations at the expense of children and taxpayers.

3. Would you support a bill to provide Education Savings Accounts (ESA’s) which are non-taxable as an alternative for parents seeking education for their children outside the public school system, with best academic performance and standards being left for the parents to judge and not subject to government regulation?

A new initiative in education seeks to link schools with communities and social services, environmental projects, and businesses. These “partnerships” are often formed with institutions or “stakeholders,” whether they be for-profit businesses, non-profits, or other government agencies, who are not experts in education but who have influence and agendas outside the classroom and who might have interest in the profiling of children, Myriad business partners are poised to benefit financially from Common Core’s “digital learning” platforms. “Skills and competencies” which include training (workforce preparation) through drilling digital platforms, are taking the place of academic content. Big business has been promised that the standards will produce workers that employers don’t have to later train (GE Foundation gave $18 million dollars to help implement Common Core).

Many non-profit partners plan processes and organize groups to define issues, target “at-risk” individuals based on data-collection, and then implement taxpayer-funded programs. One of our schools’ local partners, Bartow Collaborative, aligns with other nonprofits like the Aids Alliance. The International Aids Alliance asserts that “all young people have sexual rights, including the right to sexual health and the right to a satisfying, safe, and pleasurable sexual life.” They work “with a particular focus on young men who have sex with men, sex workers, and transgender people” and provide “safe” abortion services, seeking to offer young people the same services as adults.

4. Will you vote to prohibit collaboration with outside businesses or other government agencies by refusing to share children’s data with them, to receive monies from them, grant them classroom instruction time, or generally grant them influence over children?

The state of GA received over $400 million dollars of our own money to adopt Common Core. Since implementing Common Core, GA taxpayers are now on the hook for an estimated $833 million dollars more. Bartow County has since applied for and received $4.1 million more federal dollars in Striving Readers Grants. These federal dollars come with strings. Since adopting Common Core our county’s school board has approved deficits in the $7.5 million range while raising property taxes for several consecutive years. At the tip of the technology iceberg, Bartow County purchased over 10,000 Apple MacBook Air computers for students with a goal of having a 1:1 computer to student ratio for 3rd-12th graders, alleging that today’s children “need” this type of technology, a claim not supported by reality. Along with data-mining comes federal technology requirements which are the latest excuse to burden local taxpayers via the SPLOST referendum to fund even more technology purchases. Poor accountability and reckless spending are predictably accompanied by lower achievement in education.

5. Will you vote to reduce spending and reject costly grants to live within the School Board’s budget without recommending another SPLOST referendum?

Bartow County families are being forced through taxation to support “charities” they did not choose and that are often-times not in line with their own moral beliefs. Cartersville has implemented a “Summer Feeding Program” using school buses and vans to provide two meals a day per child (7,500 meals a day) with no limit to the number of children they serve and requiring no criteria to qualify. They also feed football teams, band practices, and vacation bible school participants. The Bartow Give a Kid a Chance program provides “free” backpacks, clothing, and services such as haircuts, with a “goal” of serving 2,000 children. Not surprisingly, child recipient numbers have gone up dramatically since 2010, suggesting that these programs are contributing to higher poverty levels and inevitable taxation.

6. Do you support the 1st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and will you vote to force government out of the selection or establishment of all so-called “charitable” causes and other welfare services which result in dependence on the State?

Large nonprofit groups like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Pearson Charitable Foundation (the nonprofit arm of educational publishing company Pearson) funded Common Core development and worked with the U.S. Department of Education to bribe state school boards into accepting it. Once standards were implemented, the federal government required huge spending on textbooks and technology that went directly to the for-profit companies whose “sister” foundations made the initial investment, spending which appears more likely to line corporate pockets than it is to improve real academic performance. Tens of millions of dollars spent on Common Core-aligned products went to Pearson Publishing Company. When technology upgrades are made and required assessments administered, Microsoft turns a huge profit.

7. Do you oppose corporate profiteering in the classroom, and will you vote to reduce spending on corporate contracts, such as expensive and highly sophisticated technology used for data-mining and online testing, resulting in huge profits for Microsoft?

Common Core is another iteration of the failed Outcome-Based Education model, using predetermined outcomes as a goal. An emphasis of this progressive education theory is on producing government-managed citizens, not independent thinkers. Data-collection on children is indispensable in the manipulation of this outcome. The federal government has become increasingly aggressive about demanding personally identifiable student data in conjunction with federal grants. The U. S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said: “We want to see more states build comprehensive systems that track students from pre-K through college and then link school data to workforce data.” And at a U.S. Department of Education hosted conference, a technology company CEO said: “We are collecting billions of records of data…pulling data from everywhere… This data will help students develop the 21st century skills that the government has determined students will need.”

8. Do you oppose the collection and storage of data of our children in the classroom by the federal government (such as in the Smarter Balanced Assessment of Common Core), and will you vote to protect our children’s privacy in this matter?

As with most infringements on liberty, gun control not only makes us less free, it makes us less safe. Respecting the right of the people to keep and bear arms is the original and best homeland security policy. Every year, thousands of Americans use firearms to stop violent criminals. If the prohibition against concealed carry by faculty on campuses were lifted, it would send a very strong message to criminals who would most likely seek “gun-free” zones to attack.

9. Would you support a Campus Carry bill repealing laws that take away an individual’s right to arm him/herself on educational properties and prohibit him/her from potentially saving many innocent other innocent lives in the event of a terroristic attack?

Survey Results

Key: = Yes, = No, = Refused to answer

OFFICE

DISTRICT

PARTY

NAME

Q1

Q2

Q3

Q4

Q5

Q6

Q7

Q8

Q9

Bartow County Board Of Education

5

R

Anna Sullivan

Bartow County Board Of Education

1

R

Fred Kittle