Watch student decimate Common Core: Founding Fathers 'turning in their graves'

by Cheryl Carpenter Klimek

A Tennessee high school student spoke from personal experience when he gave a highly critical speech on Common Core at the Knox County School Board meeting earlier this month.

Ethan Young, a senior at Farragut High School, recited the history of Common Core, beginning in 2009 when the National Governor's Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, partnered with a nonprofit funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

He said in his recorded speech that while the initiative "seemed to spring from states," it was developed by educational testing executives and only two academic content specialists, neither of which approved the final standards.

"I mean, how convenient calculating who knows what, and who needs what," Young said. "I mean why don't we manufacture robots instead of students?"

A "standards-based education," Young said, is ruling the way teachers are teaching and students are learning.

"If everything I learned in high school was a measurable objective, I haven't learned anything," he said.

"Somewhere our Founding Fathers are turning in their graves, turning and screaming, and trying to say to us, that we teach to free minds."

Watch Young's speech here: