DUBAI, United Arab Emirates – The 2nd Annual MENA Common Core Conference kicks off today in Dubai, proving that Common Core – the national standards initiative championed by the Obama administration – is going global.

According to a report today from Grumpy Opinions, the conference is being sponsored by Middle East North Africa Common Core and Know.Do.Serve.Learn (KDSL), whose website states:

On October 24th and 25th hundreds of education professionals and scholars from the Middle East, North Africa and America will gather in Dubai for a symposium on implementing Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in regional American curriculum schools. The goal of this annual conference is to inform education professionals about implementing the CCSS in English Language Arts and Mathematics in their schools. The conference also seeks to empower teachers to increase the academic success of their students, showcase exceptional CCSS aligned classroom resources and connect CCSS educators across the Middle East and North Africa. Last years conference, the first of its kind, attracted over 300 attendees from 7 countries and 23 speakers. This year’s conference will exceed those numbers.

Conference partners include Oxford University, Pearson Education, Arab Gulf Education, Teach United Arab Emirates, National Geographic, and Amideast, an organization who proudly states that one of its staff was formerly associated with the radical Islamic terrorist organization, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Amideast also deceptively describes the Muslim Brotherhood as simply “the oldest religiously-founded group of its kind in the Middle East.”

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Conference organizer KDSL recently released a white paper highlighting American curriculum schools in Dubai and recommending the Common Core State Standards.

The white paper, Three Things Every Parent Should Know About American Curriculum Schools In Dubai, goes through the usual Common Core spiel — that it’s state led, defines what students should know and be able to do at each grade level, does not dictate curriculum, etc.

Additionally, KDSL’s white paper, which claims to have elicited responses from “stakeholders in the US and UAE,” says that US educational administrators describe ‘American curriculum’ as follows:

An American curriculum should be one that emphasizes the ideas of the quest of  freedom, the need of justice, the struggle to imagine and believe in something deeper and fitting for all of humanity, and the desire to innovate systems for a greater good. Of course, this appears to bend heavily on the humanities, but I think all disciplines, when taught and
explored in its most intuitive sense, are based on these underpinnings of an American curriculum.

The document then states that what UAE parents want from an American curriculum is a “whole child curriculum” where “character education, pastoral care, and development of unique individual interests counts just as much as what goes on in the classrooms…”

KDSL then goes on to recommend Common Core and several resources for implementation.

MENA Common Core says this weekend’s conference is the perfect place for educational organizations and companies to showcase what they have to offer to the greater community.

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As stated by Grumpy Opinions:

Bill Gates/Microsoft and some of the corporations that make up the Chamber of Commerce stand to generate billions of dollars a year just from the implementation of Common Core in the United States.  We only account for 5% of the worlds total population, imagine how much they could make from globalization of the scheme.

Of course, as global education activists promote the Common Core State Standards in Dubai this weekend, there will likely be no mention of the fact that more than a dozen US states are fighting to dump the standards.