The Bill Ayres/CSCOPE Connection

Well, that didn't take long.

Yesterday, the Wichita Falls Times Record News reported:

CSCOPE documents also claim connection to Linda Hammond, a proponent of the nationalized Common Core movement that Texas has rejected in favor of its own standards.

That would be the same Linda Hammond who Bill Ayres endorsed for Secretary of Education in the (then) incoming Obama administration in 2009:

Of course I would have loved to have seen Linda Darling-Hammond become Secretary of Education in an Obama administration.  She's smart, honest, compassionate, courageous, and perhaps most striking, she actually knows schools and classrooms, curriculum and teaching, kids and child development....What makes education in a democracy distinct is a commitment to a particularly precious and fragile ideal, and that it is a belief that the fullest development is all is the necessary condition for the full development of each.

Accuracy in Media details the endgame for Ayres and Hammond:

Both Ayres and Hammond were leaders in the small schools movement.  She has been published in a collection edited by Ayres.  Both have been proponents of ending funding disparities between urban and suburban schools, ending standardized testing, and attacking 'white privilege.'  She has been a board member for CASEL (Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning), a group housed at the University of Illinois at Chicago, that provides studies of, and services for, Emotional Intelligence in schools -- but really emotional manipulation aimed at making students global citizens.

The 83rd Texas Legislature has no business authorizing any public education funding until it gets to the bottom of CSCOPE.