JUST SAY NO - TO COMMON CORE
Introducing famous homeschooling mother and daughter team of Frontier Media 2000, Alexandra and Joyce Swann who will be guest blogging on Twinas!
They will be telling us how, by homeschooling year around, our children can be learning in a safe, nurturing environment, and receiving graduate degrees, while their friends are barely graduating high school! Join in on Alexandra's blog:
To Big Government Socialist Education--Just Say No
Common Core was funded through the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and the "standards" it imposes greatly accelerate the decline of academics that we have been witnessing in our country over the past forty years. Common Core seeks to replace English literature with non fiction works, seeks to shift all emphasis from classical education to social engineering and works to create a system of learning math in which the right answer does not matter as long as the student can explain to the teacher how he got the answer he did.
Teachers are now "change agents" who are instructed to read the Gettysburg Address with no emotion and no context. This complete lack of standards for students also comes with its own language for parents--an Orwellian speak designed to prevent the parents from understanding anything that is being said.
Perhaps most disturbing are the tracking and data mining aspects of Common Core. Schools are creating systems that will allow them to track the preferences, political leanings and prejudices of the students and their families from kindergarten through high school graduation.
Parents still have alternatives, but they have to know that those alternatives exist and that they are worth the sacrifice that they involve. That is one reason we wanted to talk about the struggles our family faced during our own homeschooling journey. It is our hope that our family's experiences with homeschooling will help other parents understand that they can take control of their children's educations and will inspire them to do so while they still can.
On February 28, 2014, my mother Joyce and I finished a month of guest
hosting a local women's program for KSCE-TV. For our final show, we
chose to discuss Common Core and our family's own experiences with
homeschooling. To view that program, and read what others are reporting on Common Core, visit Alexandra's blog "Paying for Protection"
Alexandra Swann
In 1986, Alexandra Swann graduated at fifteen years of age with a bachelor’s degree in liberal arts from Brigham Young University and a GPA of 3.85. The following year, when she was sixteen, she received a Master’s Degree in History from California State University. After graduation, she taught history and English as a second language for four years at El Paso Community College. In 1989, her book, No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master’s Degree at Age Sixteen, was published, in which she details her experiences with homeschooling.
For fifteen years, from 1998-2013, Alexandra was self-employed in
the financial services industry in El Paso, Texas. As a small
business owner who was active in the community and on various civic
boards, she learned first-hand the challenges that excessive
regulations create for small businesses. In 2012 she received the
SBA’s Regional Minority Small Business Champion of the Year award.
In 2010, Alexandra and her mother incorporated Frontier 2000 Media
Group to produce clean, wholesome, inspirational entertainment for
families. She re-released No Regrets with a new foreword to
the twentieth anniversary edition of the book updating readers on
what her family is doing today. She is also co-author of four
Christian fiction novels including The Fourth Kingdom which
was selected as one of four finalists in the Christianity Today
2011 Christian Fiction Book Awards. Her newest solo novel, The
Planner, about the dangerous consequences of over-reaching,
progressive federal government, was released June 28, 2012.
Joyce Swann
Joyce Swann has been a Christian since childhood and a prayer warrior for over forty years. She became nationally-known in the 1990’s because of her work homeschooling her ten children from the first grade through masters’ degrees before their seventeenth birthdays. She has been featured on Paul Harvey’s weekly radio program, CBN, and the 1990’s CBS series, How’d They Do That? She has been interviewed by Woman’s World, The National Enquirer, and numerous regional newspapers. The story of the Swann family has also been featured in the National Review and several books about homeschooling success stories.
Joyce is the author or co-author of five novels, including The
Fourth Kingdom, which was selected as a finalist in the
Christianity Today 2011 fiction of the year awards and The
Warrior which, since its release in 2012, has had over 50,000
Kindle downloads and hundreds of glowing reviews. She was a popular
columnist for Practical Homeschooling for nearly decade and
she has retold her own story of homeschooling her ten children in
Looking Backward: My Twenty-Five Years as a Homeschooling Mother.
The Warrior is her first solo novel.
Website: http://www.frontier2000.net
Alexandra’s blog: http://www.protectionmoney.blogspot.com
Joyce’s blog. http://www.frontier2000.blogspot.com
Twitter: @alexandraswann and @Frontier_2000
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/frontier2000mediagroup
