The Cardinal Newman Society has discovered that the National Catholic Education Association (NCEA) was granted more than $100,000 by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to support implementation of the controversial Common Core standards in diocesan schools.

Catholic Education Daily, an online publication of The Cardinal Newman Society, an organization devoted to restoring the Catholic identity in U.S. Catholic universities, is reporting that the grant was made in September and is only adding to the controversy surrounding the NCEA's adoption of the flawed Common Core curriculum.

The standards are so inferior, in fact, that a group of more than 100 of the country's most prominent Catholic scholars sent a letter to every U.S. bishop describing the curriculum's many problems, saying that adoption would "move parochial schools away from their grounding in the church". The letter recommends that the curriculum not be adopted by Catholic schools which have yet to approve it, and those schools that already have "should seek an orderly withdrawal now."

Revelations about the Gates grant comes just as the Cardinal Newman Society and other Catholic groups led by the National Association of Private Catholic and Independent Schools (NAPCIS) are preparing to meet in New Jersey with Catholic educators to discuss concerns about Common Core.

Just this week, the Society released a survey of principals from the top-ranked Catholic schools in the Society's High School Honor Roll and found that the principals oppose Catholic schools rushing to adopt Common Core without careful analysis.

The $100,000 grant to the NCEA isn't the end of the monetary contributions flowing from the Gates Foundation to other Catholic entities to promote Common Core, however.

"This year it granted $248,343 to DePaul University for Leading with Algebra, described by the University as 'a partnership between DePaul and the Chicago Public Schools to support the implementation of the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics in algebra for grades 6-8'," writes the Daily's Joe Giganit.

"And in 2010, the Gates Foundation granted $556,006 to the Cristo Rey Network, in part to implement Common Core in the nationwide network of Catholic schools."

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has come under fire for its support for population control programs, and for funding abortion advocacy groups such as the International Planned Parenthood Federation and the United Nations Population Fund.

Patrick J. Reilly, president of The Cardinal Newman Society, will be discussing this issue with EWTN’s The World Over with Raymond Arroyo this week. The show can be seen on Sunday, Nov. 10 at 7 p.m. ET, and Monday, Nov. 11 at 10 p.m. ET.

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