• What if, instead of Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, it were an extreme right wing foundation, that gave $225 billion, to unaccountable lobby groups, to create these standards?

•  What if it were a conservative president, who created a program,  whereby states were promised money, simply on the virtue of accepting standards that were not written yet?

•  Standards put together without any input from university professors, who will have to teach children taught according to the Common Core Standards.

• There were two content experts on the Common Core Validation Committee and both of them, Dr. James Milgram in math and Dr. Sandra Stotsky in English, refused to sign off on the standards.

• The exemplar texts from the Common Core Reading List are being incorporated into curriculum. Publishers are incorporating excerpts into their textbooks. So when the state says schools can choose curriculum, all of them are aligned. Schools and teachers are not really given a choice. (And just because South Dakota has removed the Common Core ELA Appendix B, The Common Core Suggested Reading List, from it’s website, does not mean those texts are removed from the Common Core.)

• Parents are not paranoid. They are awake.