Of Other Interest.....
In this series of tabs, we will discuss Education, in particular COMMON CORE and Homeschooling on this page. Look below these Homeschooling posts to view all the info we have about Common Core!! We also have a tab below this main tab that discusses how the government is Attacking our Rights. Another tab discusses that we as American Citizens need to Think for Ourselves.
This particular page will deal with Homeschooling. Please bear with us - it is under construction. Basically, we will list sites that are possibly good resources for Homeschooling if one prefers to go that route!
This particular page will deal with Homeschooling. Please bear with us - it is under construction. Basically, we will list sites that are possibly good resources for Homeschooling if one prefers to go that route!
Georgetown University Threatens Student Group For Upholding Catholic Teachings Love Saxa is in danger of being stripped of its status as an official student group at Georgetown University. Its offense: holding to a Catholic view of human sexuality.
By James Gottry
OCTOBER 27, 2017
Georgetown’s website proclaims it is “the oldest Catholic and Jesuit institute of higher learning in the United States” and is “deeply rooted in the Catholic faith.” One campus group is learning, however, Georgetown’s roots might not be deep enough.
Love Saxa is a recognized student group on the Georgetown campus, and it exists “to promote healthy relationships on campus through cultivating a proper understanding of sex, gender, marriage, and family among Georgetown students.” Given the emphasis the Catholic Church puts on these issues (for example, see here and here), and Love Saxa’s alignment with church doctrine, one might believe it safe to assume Love Saxa is squarely within safe territory at a Catholic university. But, oh, the perils of assumption. Love Saxa is in danger of being stripped of its status as an official student group. Its offense: holding to a Catholic view of human sexuality.
Confessions of a College VirginLove Saxa has courted controversy before, what with its propensity to unapologetically express a Catholic view at a Catholic institution. A recent opinion editorial by the group’s president, Amelia Irvine, ignited the current scandal.
On September 6, Georgetown’s student newspaper, The Hoya, published Irvine’s “Confessions of a College Virgin.” In it, Irvine describes Love Saxa’s dedication to “healthy relationships and sexual integrity,” including its stance on premarital sex, sexual complementarity, and same-sex marriage. Suffice it to say, in an age where universities commonly use school funds to sponsor “sex weeks” and lectures by porn stars, Love Saxa seeks to stimulate an embrace of chastity.
The resulting outrage was palpable. In a complaint filed with the university through its internal grievance process, student Jasmin Ouseph issued a blistering critique of Love Saxa’s “violent…dehumanizing…hateful, and…dangerous” “rhetoric.” Ouseph left no doubt of her desired outcome, stating “what I’m asking for is for Love Saxa to no longer be recognized by the University.” The Hoya’s editorial board likewise published a response to Irvine’s “Confessions,” imploring the Student Activities Commission to “defund intolerance.” On October 30, the commission will hold a hearing to determine Love Saxa’s fate.
Chastity: The New Scarlet LetterSifting through the allegations leveled in the complaint and editorial, Love Saxa’s offense becomes abundantly clear. The group holds views that are unapologetically consistent with Catholic doctrine. Specifically, Love Saxa agrees with the Catholic Church that sex belongs within the context of a marriage relationship, and that marriage is the union of one man and one woman.
These Catholic beliefs, according to the editorial board and Ouseph, are tantamount to intolerance, violence, and hate. These Catholic beliefs, they say, also do not belong at a Catholic university. In asking the university to de-recognize Love Saxa, Ouseph and the editorial board point to Georgetown’s “Student Organization Standards,” which, among other things, bar student organizations from official recognition if they “foster hatred or intolerance of others because of their race, nationality, gender, religion or sexual preference.”
Ouseph argues Love Saxa’s stance on marriage constitutes “unquestionable intolerance” and “clearly excludes same-sex couples,” which in turn “fosters hatred.” The complaint, which incorporates testimony from other students, goes on to label the group’s views as “archaic,” “cissexist,” “homophobic,” “transphobic,” “queerphobic,” “oppressive,” “dehumanizing,” “hateful,” and “dangerous.” In response to Love Saxa’s stance that the group’s positions are consistent with the Catholic Church, the complaint labels such a reliance on Catholic teaching as a “disgrace.” Ouseph concluded her complaint by stating that if the university allows Love Saxa to remain a recognized student group, it will be “disheartening” and demonstrate “that the (Catholic) University shares Love Saxa’s view of marriage – as between a man and woman with the intent of raising biological children.”
Love Wins, You Sickening BigotsApart from marveling at the force with which they attack the Catholic beliefs of a student group at one of the nation’s preeminent Catholic universities, it is impossible to read the complaint or editorial without wondering how Ouseph and The Hoya’s editorial board can vehemently reject a Catholic view of marriage and sexuality; label it archaic, hateful, and dangerous; advocate for Georgetown to de-recognize Love Saxa; and do all this without recognizing their own position as “foster[ing] hatred or intolerance of others because of their…religion.”
In contrast, Love Saxa has not sought to advocate for the de-recognition of the multiple LGBT groups on campus, even though the same Student Organization Standards cited in the complaint bar student organizations that are “inconsistent with acceptable conduct at an American university committed to the Roman Catholic moral tradition.” It has not called for the dissolution of the LGBTQ Resource Center or protested the university’s Lavender Graduation ceremonies.
On the contrary, Love Saxa has demonstrated a commitment to engaging in dialogue rather than seeking to silence divergent perspectives. (Meanwhile, Ouseph says it is an “undue burden” for “queer students to have to dialogue with people” who hold different views on human sexuality.) Love Saxa’s stance is worthy of respect even in the face of disagreement. Justice Kennedy said as much when he penned the U.S. Supreme Court’s opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges, which invalidated state laws defining marriage as the union between a man and a woman. Kennedy wrote: “Many who deem same-sex marriage to be wrong reach that conclusion based on decent and honorable religious or philosophical premises, and neither they nor their beliefs are disparaged here.”
Will a Catholic University Dare to Be Catholic?What remains to be seen is what approach Georgetown University will take. Clearly, the decision will be very much in the light, not in the shadows like recent events at Queen’s College in New York, Georgia Gwinnett College, or the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.
In those cases, my colleagues at the ADF Center for Academic Freedom are defending the First Amendment rights of students and organizations that have been punished for their political or religious views. As a private university, Georgetown is not constrained by the First Amendment. Thus, while ADF continues to represent and advise Love Saxa, Georgetown’s pending decision is primarily ideological.
Will it hold to its deep roots of faith, or cast them aside in favor of a new orthodoxy of human sexuality? Will it continue in its Jesuit tradition and resulting commitment to “religious and cultural pluralism,” or seek to compel uniformity of thought? Will it remain a marketplace of ideas, or expel particular views from campus?
More to the point, will Georgetown decide it is Catholic, or not?
James Gottry is an attorney and writer at Alliance Defending Freedom.
Love Saxa is a recognized student group on the Georgetown campus, and it exists “to promote healthy relationships on campus through cultivating a proper understanding of sex, gender, marriage, and family among Georgetown students.” Given the emphasis the Catholic Church puts on these issues (for example, see here and here), and Love Saxa’s alignment with church doctrine, one might believe it safe to assume Love Saxa is squarely within safe territory at a Catholic university. But, oh, the perils of assumption. Love Saxa is in danger of being stripped of its status as an official student group. Its offense: holding to a Catholic view of human sexuality.
Confessions of a College VirginLove Saxa has courted controversy before, what with its propensity to unapologetically express a Catholic view at a Catholic institution. A recent opinion editorial by the group’s president, Amelia Irvine, ignited the current scandal.
On September 6, Georgetown’s student newspaper, The Hoya, published Irvine’s “Confessions of a College Virgin.” In it, Irvine describes Love Saxa’s dedication to “healthy relationships and sexual integrity,” including its stance on premarital sex, sexual complementarity, and same-sex marriage. Suffice it to say, in an age where universities commonly use school funds to sponsor “sex weeks” and lectures by porn stars, Love Saxa seeks to stimulate an embrace of chastity.
The resulting outrage was palpable. In a complaint filed with the university through its internal grievance process, student Jasmin Ouseph issued a blistering critique of Love Saxa’s “violent…dehumanizing…hateful, and…dangerous” “rhetoric.” Ouseph left no doubt of her desired outcome, stating “what I’m asking for is for Love Saxa to no longer be recognized by the University.” The Hoya’s editorial board likewise published a response to Irvine’s “Confessions,” imploring the Student Activities Commission to “defund intolerance.” On October 30, the commission will hold a hearing to determine Love Saxa’s fate.
Chastity: The New Scarlet LetterSifting through the allegations leveled in the complaint and editorial, Love Saxa’s offense becomes abundantly clear. The group holds views that are unapologetically consistent with Catholic doctrine. Specifically, Love Saxa agrees with the Catholic Church that sex belongs within the context of a marriage relationship, and that marriage is the union of one man and one woman.
These Catholic beliefs, according to the editorial board and Ouseph, are tantamount to intolerance, violence, and hate. These Catholic beliefs, they say, also do not belong at a Catholic university. In asking the university to de-recognize Love Saxa, Ouseph and the editorial board point to Georgetown’s “Student Organization Standards,” which, among other things, bar student organizations from official recognition if they “foster hatred or intolerance of others because of their race, nationality, gender, religion or sexual preference.”
Ouseph argues Love Saxa’s stance on marriage constitutes “unquestionable intolerance” and “clearly excludes same-sex couples,” which in turn “fosters hatred.” The complaint, which incorporates testimony from other students, goes on to label the group’s views as “archaic,” “cissexist,” “homophobic,” “transphobic,” “queerphobic,” “oppressive,” “dehumanizing,” “hateful,” and “dangerous.” In response to Love Saxa’s stance that the group’s positions are consistent with the Catholic Church, the complaint labels such a reliance on Catholic teaching as a “disgrace.” Ouseph concluded her complaint by stating that if the university allows Love Saxa to remain a recognized student group, it will be “disheartening” and demonstrate “that the (Catholic) University shares Love Saxa’s view of marriage – as between a man and woman with the intent of raising biological children.”
Love Wins, You Sickening BigotsApart from marveling at the force with which they attack the Catholic beliefs of a student group at one of the nation’s preeminent Catholic universities, it is impossible to read the complaint or editorial without wondering how Ouseph and The Hoya’s editorial board can vehemently reject a Catholic view of marriage and sexuality; label it archaic, hateful, and dangerous; advocate for Georgetown to de-recognize Love Saxa; and do all this without recognizing their own position as “foster[ing] hatred or intolerance of others because of their…religion.”
In contrast, Love Saxa has not sought to advocate for the de-recognition of the multiple LGBT groups on campus, even though the same Student Organization Standards cited in the complaint bar student organizations that are “inconsistent with acceptable conduct at an American university committed to the Roman Catholic moral tradition.” It has not called for the dissolution of the LGBTQ Resource Center or protested the university’s Lavender Graduation ceremonies.
On the contrary, Love Saxa has demonstrated a commitment to engaging in dialogue rather than seeking to silence divergent perspectives. (Meanwhile, Ouseph says it is an “undue burden” for “queer students to have to dialogue with people” who hold different views on human sexuality.) Love Saxa’s stance is worthy of respect even in the face of disagreement. Justice Kennedy said as much when he penned the U.S. Supreme Court’s opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges, which invalidated state laws defining marriage as the union between a man and a woman. Kennedy wrote: “Many who deem same-sex marriage to be wrong reach that conclusion based on decent and honorable religious or philosophical premises, and neither they nor their beliefs are disparaged here.”
Will a Catholic University Dare to Be Catholic?What remains to be seen is what approach Georgetown University will take. Clearly, the decision will be very much in the light, not in the shadows like recent events at Queen’s College in New York, Georgia Gwinnett College, or the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.
In those cases, my colleagues at the ADF Center for Academic Freedom are defending the First Amendment rights of students and organizations that have been punished for their political or religious views. As a private university, Georgetown is not constrained by the First Amendment. Thus, while ADF continues to represent and advise Love Saxa, Georgetown’s pending decision is primarily ideological.
Will it hold to its deep roots of faith, or cast them aside in favor of a new orthodoxy of human sexuality? Will it continue in its Jesuit tradition and resulting commitment to “religious and cultural pluralism,” or seek to compel uniformity of thought? Will it remain a marketplace of ideas, or expel particular views from campus?
More to the point, will Georgetown decide it is Catholic, or not?
James Gottry is an attorney and writer at Alliance Defending Freedom.
Why Megan McArdle Shouldn’t Lose Faith In School Choice Just Yet
By Joy Pullmann
OCTOBER 27, 2017
Megan McArdle is the latest right-ish person to cast shade on school choice after a few studies found initially negative effects on kids’ math achievement in Louisiana’s voucher program. Although after a few years they leveled up again, these were the first negative school voucher effects found in any high-quality studies. Her latest column asserts “We libertarians were really wrong about school vouchers.” I partially agree with that statement, but for much different reasons.
McArdle’s reasons essentially boil down to “We’ve got a bunch of voucher programs now, but U.S. public education still stinks and it looks like many parents have different education priorities than I do.” Here are a few key paragraphs — feel free to click over and read the whole thing:
Some studies suggest that voucher programs do modest good; others suggest that they do very little; and a few suggest that the impacts are actually negative. My overall takeaway from the literature is that voucher programs probably do a little bit of good. But the emphasis is on the word ‘little’; they are not a cure-all, or even much of a cure for anything. It was reasonable to think, in 1997, that voucher programs could change the world. Now we have two decades of evidence…
McArdle then says maybe the modest academic effects studies keep finding for school vouchers happen because a new study finds that parents care more about environment:
The socioeconomic status of the students in a school is somewhat easier for parents to observe than the quality of the pedagogy. It’s not then, all that surprising that when researchers sat down to analyze parental decision-making in New York City public school, peer group seemed to be what parents were looking at. And peer group matters a great deal.
McArdle thus concludes that school choice is less legitimate because many families use that opportunity to choose a specific school culture and relationship networks for their kids. Nope. This is in fact more evidence that school choice is a success.
Are Parents’ School Preferences Legitimate?Let’s start here by taking a look at a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, the only research McArdle directly cites in the column. Notably, it studies not vouchers but how parents choose among public high schools in New York City. They rank their choices among those available, and a centralized mechanism uses those rankings plus schools’ own criteria to assign kids. So this system is not especially comparable to access to private schools, although the paper says parents’ real preferences are “weakly” in line with how they rank schools on the application on average.
The paper finds that parents’ top two preferences for the schools they rank on the application are home proximity and academic performance. The researchers then control for the part of achievement that comes from kids’ natural ability rather than superior teaching. This results in the conclusion that parents actually prefer schools with smarter kids (“peer quality”) rather than ones that are better institutionally at moving kids’ test scores up.
The authors say this is troubling and negates one of the promises of school choice, of improving instructional and curricular quality. Instead, they suggest choice more efficiently sorts smarter kids into better schools.our findings imply that parents’ choices tend to penalize schools that enroll low achievers rather than schools that offer poor instruction. As a result, school choice programs may generate stronger incentives for screening than for improved school productivity…
If parents respond to peer quality but not causal effectiveness, a school’s easiest path to boosting its popularity is to improve the average ability of its student population. Since peer quality is a fixed resource, this creates the potential for socially costly zero-sum competition as schools invest in mechanisms to attract the best students.
Actually, This Shows How Smart Parents AreSeveral responses. First, it seems reasonable that rating systems that look for how much a school adds to students’ test scores penalize schools that have higher starting scores, because their students have less of a gap to close. Schools with more smart kids may thus also have great instruction that shows up less on value-added measures. The reverse of this argument has been used with some success to complain about judging teachers in low-achieving schools based on student test score growth year after year.
Second, the idea that the general public knows the difference between high natural ability that produces good academic performance versus exemplary teaching that produces good academic performance is widely disproven by a number of scholarly and popular works on IQ and testing. In other words, just because parents send their kids to schools that perform better more because of the student body than the teachers doesn’t mean that is parents’ intent. They look and see high achievement and say I want my kids to be part of that. That’s not bad.
In fact, this intuition is backed up by research that finds that one’s academic output is a little like one’s gene expression: Environment can’t change the underlying ability students have, but it can either help a student reach the top of his or her ability or shunt him or her down to its lower bound.
These NYC parents aren’t stupid or prejudiced. Peer group matters. Research finds that being placed into a classroom with more misbehaving peers is likely to increase a child’s bad behavior; kids of single moms are less likely to become single mothers themselves if they live in a mostly married neighborhood; and disadvantaged students are brought up to higher achievement by being placed into classrooms with higher-achieving peers. What we need in not just schooling but society at large is for morepeople to aspire towards the behaviors, social networks, and attitudes of high achievers, rather than accept the soft bigotry of low expectations based on background.
All this paper really shows is that test results are highly correlated, not with school quality, but with native intelligence. This is something we’ve known since the 1960s Coleman Report. That was one of its bombshell findings, and it has since been widely and repeatedly replicated. Since the scientific debate over the extent to which achievement is hardwired versus environmental is far from settled, it seems unfair to blame parents so prematurely for making choices to place their kids at high-achieving schools.
It’s even more so when you consider that public schools have become increasingly segregated by race and income largely because richer people — who are disproportionately people of higher IQ — can and do buy their way into better, more expensive, public school districts. Eliminating programs that broaden choices to less-wealthy people does not reduce peer-group selection. In fact, the research finds school choice programs integrate races and classes far better than assigned public schooling does. So, even if we assume both that this is happening and that it is bad, a choice system is less bad on this score than traditional school districts are.
Most Programs Aren’t Designed to Offer Good ChoicesIf the problem is that there are simply not enough good schools to go around, well, that is something not only not well-addressed by public school systems (hence decades of searching for improvements), but it’s a key problem with existing voucher programs. They are not designed to increase the supply of good schools.
Places like the Wall Street Journal and right-leaning think tanks have wildly celebrated the proliferation in choice programs since Republicans began leading a majority of state legislatures. I think the cheer has outpaced the reality. The number of children using vouchers is miniscule, and by design, since most programs have very low participation caps. Using EdChoice and NCES data, I estimate that less than 1 percent of U.S. K-12 kids use school vouchers today. No wonder it’s not “working miracles.” It’s affecting very few Americans.
These programs are also regulated by the same people whose failures at running public school systems generated pressure for vouchers in the first place. Exhibit No. 1: Many voucher programs require participating schools to administer state-tests, which are notorious for poor quality, mostly connected to Common Core, and well-recognized as putting curriculum in a headlock of failed education-school ideas.
Exhibit No. 2: School-choice initiatives so far have not appropriately deregulated state private-school laws to better fit a choice environment. Most states regulate private schools a lot more than most people would expect, in deeply important ways such as teacher certification and curricula, as well as accreditation. The quick summary is that it’s essentially impossible to get a private school going that can participate in a school choice program from the get-go, like charter schools do. Further, if one does open or even operate an existing private school, it is pushed by regulations to behave more like existing public schools than something superior.
Thus, all school choice programs have done, besides with other counterproductive regulations imposing extra regulatory barriers to participation, is provide a modest way to fill empty seats in existing, already overregulated private schools. This is not a market that will produce hardly any new choices for families. So, again, it’s not surprising that research finds these programs do, on balance, benefit both participants and kids at nearby public schools, but that the effects are rather modest. That’s about the best in academic effects we could hope for such underfed, weed-choked tokens to the concept of parent choice in education.
There’s one area in which vouchers are already a huge, clear success, and it’s an economic area, so I’m surprised McArdle missed it. Existing programs offer slightly better long-term results for kids and society — at dramatically less expense than public schools. The typical choice program costs $3,000-$6,000 per kid. The average annual per pupil spending in public schools is $12,000. The math is not that easy, of course, but even when people smarter than me work it out you cannot ignore the fact that existing school choice structures offer a slightly better product at a deep discount.
Given that states face impending fiscal nightmares, not to mention the federal government’s, this ought to be seen as yet another major reason to dramatically accelerate the growth of genuine parent choices in K-12 education.
Joy Pullmann is managing editor of The Federalist and author of "The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids," out from Encounter Books this spring. Get it on Amazon.
McArdle’s reasons essentially boil down to “We’ve got a bunch of voucher programs now, but U.S. public education still stinks and it looks like many parents have different education priorities than I do.” Here are a few key paragraphs — feel free to click over and read the whole thing:
Some studies suggest that voucher programs do modest good; others suggest that they do very little; and a few suggest that the impacts are actually negative. My overall takeaway from the literature is that voucher programs probably do a little bit of good. But the emphasis is on the word ‘little’; they are not a cure-all, or even much of a cure for anything. It was reasonable to think, in 1997, that voucher programs could change the world. Now we have two decades of evidence…
McArdle then says maybe the modest academic effects studies keep finding for school vouchers happen because a new study finds that parents care more about environment:
The socioeconomic status of the students in a school is somewhat easier for parents to observe than the quality of the pedagogy. It’s not then, all that surprising that when researchers sat down to analyze parental decision-making in New York City public school, peer group seemed to be what parents were looking at. And peer group matters a great deal.
McArdle thus concludes that school choice is less legitimate because many families use that opportunity to choose a specific school culture and relationship networks for their kids. Nope. This is in fact more evidence that school choice is a success.
Are Parents’ School Preferences Legitimate?Let’s start here by taking a look at a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, the only research McArdle directly cites in the column. Notably, it studies not vouchers but how parents choose among public high schools in New York City. They rank their choices among those available, and a centralized mechanism uses those rankings plus schools’ own criteria to assign kids. So this system is not especially comparable to access to private schools, although the paper says parents’ real preferences are “weakly” in line with how they rank schools on the application on average.
The paper finds that parents’ top two preferences for the schools they rank on the application are home proximity and academic performance. The researchers then control for the part of achievement that comes from kids’ natural ability rather than superior teaching. This results in the conclusion that parents actually prefer schools with smarter kids (“peer quality”) rather than ones that are better institutionally at moving kids’ test scores up.
The authors say this is troubling and negates one of the promises of school choice, of improving instructional and curricular quality. Instead, they suggest choice more efficiently sorts smarter kids into better schools.our findings imply that parents’ choices tend to penalize schools that enroll low achievers rather than schools that offer poor instruction. As a result, school choice programs may generate stronger incentives for screening than for improved school productivity…
If parents respond to peer quality but not causal effectiveness, a school’s easiest path to boosting its popularity is to improve the average ability of its student population. Since peer quality is a fixed resource, this creates the potential for socially costly zero-sum competition as schools invest in mechanisms to attract the best students.
Actually, This Shows How Smart Parents AreSeveral responses. First, it seems reasonable that rating systems that look for how much a school adds to students’ test scores penalize schools that have higher starting scores, because their students have less of a gap to close. Schools with more smart kids may thus also have great instruction that shows up less on value-added measures. The reverse of this argument has been used with some success to complain about judging teachers in low-achieving schools based on student test score growth year after year.
Second, the idea that the general public knows the difference between high natural ability that produces good academic performance versus exemplary teaching that produces good academic performance is widely disproven by a number of scholarly and popular works on IQ and testing. In other words, just because parents send their kids to schools that perform better more because of the student body than the teachers doesn’t mean that is parents’ intent. They look and see high achievement and say I want my kids to be part of that. That’s not bad.
In fact, this intuition is backed up by research that finds that one’s academic output is a little like one’s gene expression: Environment can’t change the underlying ability students have, but it can either help a student reach the top of his or her ability or shunt him or her down to its lower bound.
These NYC parents aren’t stupid or prejudiced. Peer group matters. Research finds that being placed into a classroom with more misbehaving peers is likely to increase a child’s bad behavior; kids of single moms are less likely to become single mothers themselves if they live in a mostly married neighborhood; and disadvantaged students are brought up to higher achievement by being placed into classrooms with higher-achieving peers. What we need in not just schooling but society at large is for morepeople to aspire towards the behaviors, social networks, and attitudes of high achievers, rather than accept the soft bigotry of low expectations based on background.
All this paper really shows is that test results are highly correlated, not with school quality, but with native intelligence. This is something we’ve known since the 1960s Coleman Report. That was one of its bombshell findings, and it has since been widely and repeatedly replicated. Since the scientific debate over the extent to which achievement is hardwired versus environmental is far from settled, it seems unfair to blame parents so prematurely for making choices to place their kids at high-achieving schools.
It’s even more so when you consider that public schools have become increasingly segregated by race and income largely because richer people — who are disproportionately people of higher IQ — can and do buy their way into better, more expensive, public school districts. Eliminating programs that broaden choices to less-wealthy people does not reduce peer-group selection. In fact, the research finds school choice programs integrate races and classes far better than assigned public schooling does. So, even if we assume both that this is happening and that it is bad, a choice system is less bad on this score than traditional school districts are.
Most Programs Aren’t Designed to Offer Good ChoicesIf the problem is that there are simply not enough good schools to go around, well, that is something not only not well-addressed by public school systems (hence decades of searching for improvements), but it’s a key problem with existing voucher programs. They are not designed to increase the supply of good schools.
Places like the Wall Street Journal and right-leaning think tanks have wildly celebrated the proliferation in choice programs since Republicans began leading a majority of state legislatures. I think the cheer has outpaced the reality. The number of children using vouchers is miniscule, and by design, since most programs have very low participation caps. Using EdChoice and NCES data, I estimate that less than 1 percent of U.S. K-12 kids use school vouchers today. No wonder it’s not “working miracles.” It’s affecting very few Americans.
These programs are also regulated by the same people whose failures at running public school systems generated pressure for vouchers in the first place. Exhibit No. 1: Many voucher programs require participating schools to administer state-tests, which are notorious for poor quality, mostly connected to Common Core, and well-recognized as putting curriculum in a headlock of failed education-school ideas.
Exhibit No. 2: School-choice initiatives so far have not appropriately deregulated state private-school laws to better fit a choice environment. Most states regulate private schools a lot more than most people would expect, in deeply important ways such as teacher certification and curricula, as well as accreditation. The quick summary is that it’s essentially impossible to get a private school going that can participate in a school choice program from the get-go, like charter schools do. Further, if one does open or even operate an existing private school, it is pushed by regulations to behave more like existing public schools than something superior.
Thus, all school choice programs have done, besides with other counterproductive regulations imposing extra regulatory barriers to participation, is provide a modest way to fill empty seats in existing, already overregulated private schools. This is not a market that will produce hardly any new choices for families. So, again, it’s not surprising that research finds these programs do, on balance, benefit both participants and kids at nearby public schools, but that the effects are rather modest. That’s about the best in academic effects we could hope for such underfed, weed-choked tokens to the concept of parent choice in education.
There’s one area in which vouchers are already a huge, clear success, and it’s an economic area, so I’m surprised McArdle missed it. Existing programs offer slightly better long-term results for kids and society — at dramatically less expense than public schools. The typical choice program costs $3,000-$6,000 per kid. The average annual per pupil spending in public schools is $12,000. The math is not that easy, of course, but even when people smarter than me work it out you cannot ignore the fact that existing school choice structures offer a slightly better product at a deep discount.
Given that states face impending fiscal nightmares, not to mention the federal government’s, this ought to be seen as yet another major reason to dramatically accelerate the growth of genuine parent choices in K-12 education.
Joy Pullmann is managing editor of The Federalist and author of "The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids," out from Encounter Books this spring. Get it on Amazon.
The Barney Charter School Initiative
A Message from the Director
Phillip W. Kilgore
The Barney Charter School Initiative is a project of Hillsdale College devoted to the education of young Americans. Through this initiative, the College will support the launch of K-12 charter schools. These schools will train the minds and improve the hearts of young people through a rigorous, classical education in the liberal arts and sciences, with instruction in the principles of moral character and civic virtue.
Reform of American public education, to be successful and good, must be built on a foundation of classical liberal arts learning—the kind of learning best suited to a free society and most needed for its preservation. The Barney Charter School Initiative is an important step in that direction.
To advance the founding of classical charter schools, Hillsdale College works with school founding groups of parents and local citizens who care deeply about education, who plan to apply for a charter, and who are interested in an association with Hillsdale. As a relationship forms with a group, Hillsdale will assist in creating and implementing the school’s academic program. Drawing upon the experience of our College’s faculty members who have led classical schools, and an education department uniquely devoted to classical liberal arts learning, these new schools will promote a liberal and civic education in America’s public schools.
This initiative is made possible by a major grant from the Barney Family Foundation and matching gifts from other friends of Hillsdale College.
For additional information, please contact the Barney Charter School Initiative at charterschool@hillsdale.edu (email address).
Phillip W. Kilgore
The Barney Charter School Initiative is a project of Hillsdale College devoted to the education of young Americans. Through this initiative, the College will support the launch of K-12 charter schools. These schools will train the minds and improve the hearts of young people through a rigorous, classical education in the liberal arts and sciences, with instruction in the principles of moral character and civic virtue.
Reform of American public education, to be successful and good, must be built on a foundation of classical liberal arts learning—the kind of learning best suited to a free society and most needed for its preservation. The Barney Charter School Initiative is an important step in that direction.
To advance the founding of classical charter schools, Hillsdale College works with school founding groups of parents and local citizens who care deeply about education, who plan to apply for a charter, and who are interested in an association with Hillsdale. As a relationship forms with a group, Hillsdale will assist in creating and implementing the school’s academic program. Drawing upon the experience of our College’s faculty members who have led classical schools, and an education department uniquely devoted to classical liberal arts learning, these new schools will promote a liberal and civic education in America’s public schools.
This initiative is made possible by a major grant from the Barney Family Foundation and matching gifts from other friends of Hillsdale College.
For additional information, please contact the Barney Charter School Initiative at charterschool@hillsdale.edu (email address).
Do you know who is behind Common Core State Standards? This may surprise you...
Posted by Darla Dawald, National Director on March 26, 2014
Contrary to what you may have heard, there are many organizations that are involved in Common Core that also stand to gain a lot financially with its implementation nationally. Of course, these groups will tell you that their involvement is simply to provide a great education platform that will increase the learning curve of all of our children. Nothing cold be farther from the truth. This is nothing more than a plot and ploy to amass more money and essentially, control and information on our children and push toward the UN and control internationally.
WHO IS BEHIND COMMON CORE?
A nonprofit organization called Achieve, Inc., in Washington, D.C. is the main driving force behind creating the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI). The Common Core (CC) standards were initiated by private interests in Washington, D.C., without any representation from the states. See Common Core: Myths vs. Facts here written by American Principles Project.
From the Achieve, Inc. website: "To this day, Achieve remains the only education reform organization led by a Board of Directors of governors and business leaders. This unique perspective has enabled Achieve to set a bold and visionary agenda over the past 15 years, leading Education Week in 2006 to rank Achieve as one of the most influential education policy organizations in the nation." Achieve is a Washington, D.C. "think tank" which does not include membership from all of the states.
In Achieve's "Common Core Implementation Workbook" they state, "After 30 years of fits and starts, true transformational reform in education is not only possible but also entirely within our grasp." So Achieve has been working on "national education standards" for 30 years! They continue on, "The implementation challenge looms large. In response, Achieve and the U.S. Education Delivery Institute have developed a practical Common Core Implementation Workbook for all states in the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC). The workbook uses a proven performance management methodology known as 'delivery' to lay out clear action steps for states and districts. It provides relevant information, case stories of good practice, key questions and hands-on exercises for leadership teams to complete together. Regardless of your timeline, the workbook offers state and district leaders the means to plan for the CCSS and then drive successful implementation. The discipline of delivery was first developed in 2001 under U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair. "So the system of delivery was not first developed by the states but from from the United Kingdom's Tony Blair and in 2001! So much for the Common Core standards being a "state-led" effort! This is long before what is stated on the CCSSI website of this process starting in 2009!
"Eventually the creators of the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI) realized the need to present a facade of state involvement, and therefore, enlisted the National Governors Association (NGA) {a trade association that doesn't include all governors}, and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO),another DC-based trade association. Neither of these groups have grant authority from any particular state or states to write the standards. The bulk of the creative work was done by Achieve, Inc., a DC-based nonprofit that includes many progressive education reformers who have been advocating national standards and curriculum for decades. Massive funding for all this came from private interests such as The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. which has donated $150 million in grants to implement the Common Core Standards (See Common Core: Myths vs. Facts as well for further information).
For a quick visual overview on how the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI) {actually Federal Standards} view this flowchart: How is it implemented in our "States"? below: *
Contrary to what you may have heard, there are many organizations that are involved in Common Core that also stand to gain a lot financially with its implementation nationally. Of course, these groups will tell you that their involvement is simply to provide a great education platform that will increase the learning curve of all of our children. Nothing cold be farther from the truth. This is nothing more than a plot and ploy to amass more money and essentially, control and information on our children and push toward the UN and control internationally.
WHO IS BEHIND COMMON CORE?
A nonprofit organization called Achieve, Inc., in Washington, D.C. is the main driving force behind creating the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI). The Common Core (CC) standards were initiated by private interests in Washington, D.C., without any representation from the states. See Common Core: Myths vs. Facts here written by American Principles Project.
From the Achieve, Inc. website: "To this day, Achieve remains the only education reform organization led by a Board of Directors of governors and business leaders. This unique perspective has enabled Achieve to set a bold and visionary agenda over the past 15 years, leading Education Week in 2006 to rank Achieve as one of the most influential education policy organizations in the nation." Achieve is a Washington, D.C. "think tank" which does not include membership from all of the states.
In Achieve's "Common Core Implementation Workbook" they state, "After 30 years of fits and starts, true transformational reform in education is not only possible but also entirely within our grasp." So Achieve has been working on "national education standards" for 30 years! They continue on, "The implementation challenge looms large. In response, Achieve and the U.S. Education Delivery Institute have developed a practical Common Core Implementation Workbook for all states in the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC). The workbook uses a proven performance management methodology known as 'delivery' to lay out clear action steps for states and districts. It provides relevant information, case stories of good practice, key questions and hands-on exercises for leadership teams to complete together. Regardless of your timeline, the workbook offers state and district leaders the means to plan for the CCSS and then drive successful implementation. The discipline of delivery was first developed in 2001 under U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair. "So the system of delivery was not first developed by the states but from from the United Kingdom's Tony Blair and in 2001! So much for the Common Core standards being a "state-led" effort! This is long before what is stated on the CCSSI website of this process starting in 2009!
"Eventually the creators of the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI) realized the need to present a facade of state involvement, and therefore, enlisted the National Governors Association (NGA) {a trade association that doesn't include all governors}, and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO),another DC-based trade association. Neither of these groups have grant authority from any particular state or states to write the standards. The bulk of the creative work was done by Achieve, Inc., a DC-based nonprofit that includes many progressive education reformers who have been advocating national standards and curriculum for decades. Massive funding for all this came from private interests such as The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. which has donated $150 million in grants to implement the Common Core Standards (See Common Core: Myths vs. Facts as well for further information).
For a quick visual overview on how the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI) {actually Federal Standards} view this flowchart: How is it implemented in our "States"? below: *
WHAT COMPANIES HAVE TO GAIN FROM COMMON CORE?
You can see from the "How is it Implemented in our 'States'?" flowchart, there are companies that will directly benefit by implementing Common Core. Some of these companies are:
* The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, pledged $150 million dollars in Grants in 2007. Bill and Melinda Gates are directly tied to the United Nations, and they will directly benefit from the software packages that are sold to train teachers in the classroom through Microsoft.
* Publishing Companies- Pearson, Scholastic News, MacGraw Hill, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, (AZ textbooks used in Public Schools are primarily from the publisher Harcourt) etc., will benefit from Common Core because they will provide the textbooks, for training teachers and teaching students, and curriculum changes that will need to be made to implement Common Core. Pearson, the largest on-line book company in the world, announced in their 2012 Earnings Report that "The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC)...awarded Pearson and Educational Testing Service (ETS) the contract to develop test items that will be part of the new English and Mathematics assessments to be administered from the 2014-2015 school year. We continued to produce strong growth in secure online testing, an important market for the future. We increased online testing volumes by more than 10%, delivering 6.5 million state accountability tests, 4.5 million constructed response items and 21 million spoken tests. We now assess oral proficiency in English, Spanish, French, Dutch, Arabic and Chinese. We also launched the Online Assessment Readiness Tool for the PARCC and the Smarter Balance Assessment Consortium (SBAC) Common Core consortia to help 45 states prepare for the transition to online assessments." Can you say more $$$ for Pearson???
* Achieve, Inc. connections- who will benefit from Common Core? Craig Barrett is the Chairman of the Board of Directors of Achieve, Inc., he is the current Chairman for the AZ Ready Education Council; and he is a Thunderbird Faculty member promoting United Nation Principles. (He is also the Former CEO/Chairman of the Board of Intel). Computer companies will directly benefit from computer sales to the states and local school districts. All of the Common Core student assessment testing will now be computer based. See (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers {PARCC} website for more details on the new student testing that will replace AIMS).
Source http://www.arizonansagainstcommoncore.com/Who_Behind_CC.html
COMMON CORE MOVEMENT IS A TROJAN HORSE AND TIED TO THE UNITED NATIONS (UN)
If you cannot see that Common Core is tied to the United Nations you have not done your homework! The major funder of the Common Core Movement is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which has pledged $60 million dollars to this effort. Bill and Melinda Gates are tied to UN through-and-through and have spent money in America and overseas for UN programs in Africa and all over the world for decades. Wake up and smell the koolaide you have been drinking and wake up that you are being lied to! Common Core is part of the UN's plan for complete federal control over our education systems and the "Dumbing-down" of America. Again, Wake up!
More Here http://www.arizonansagainstcommoncore.com/UN_connection.html
WISE WORDS
"The best means of forming a manly, virtuous, and happy people will be found in the right education of youth. Without this foundation, every other means, in my opinion, must fail." - George Washington
"Education is the key to unlock the golden door of freedom." - Benjamin Franklin
Communist Goals from Congressional Records 1963:
Note the items in RED as they apply to the Common Core Agenda...
Communist Goals (1963) Congressional Record--Appendix, pp. A34-A35 January 10, 1963
Current Communist Goals EXTENSION OF REMARKS OF HON. A. S. HERLONG, JR. OF FLORIDA IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES Thursday, January 10, 1963 .
Mr. HERLONG. Mr. Speaker, Mrs. Patricia Nordman of De Land, Fla., is an ardent and articulate opponent of communism, and until recently published the De Land Courier, which she dedicated to the purpose of alerting the public to the dangers of communism in America.
At Mrs. Nordman's request, I include in the RECORD, under unanimous consent, the following "Current Communist Goals," which she identifies as an excerpt from "The Naked Communist," by Cleon Skousen:
[From "The Naked Communist," by Cleon Skousen]
1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war.
2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war.
3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament [by] the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.
4. Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.
5. Extension of long-term loans to Russia and Soviet satellites.
6. Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination.
7. Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N.
8. Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev's promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N.
9. Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in progress.
10. Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N.
11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces. (Some Communist leaders believe the world can be taken over as easily by the U.N. as by Moscow. Sometimes these two centers compete with each other as they are now doing in the Congo.)
12. Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party.
13. Do away with all loyalty oaths.
14. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office.
15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.
16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.
17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers' associations. Put the party line in textbooks.
18. Gain control of all student newspapers.
19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.
20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policy-making positions.
21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.
22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to "eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms."
23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. "Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art."
24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them "censorship" and a violation of free speech and free press.
25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.
26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as "normal, natural, healthy."
27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with "social" religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity, which does not need a "religious crutch."
28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of "separation of church and state."
29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.
30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the "common man."
31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the "big picture." Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.
32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture--education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.
33. Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus.
34. Eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
35. Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI.
36. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.
37. Infiltrate and gain control of big business.
38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand [or treat].
39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.
40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.
41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.
42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use ["]united force["] to solve economic, political or social problems.
43. Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government.
44. Internationalize the Panama Canal.
45. Repeal the Connally reservation so the United States cannot prevent the World Court from seizing jurisdiction [over domestic problems. Give the World Court jurisdiction] over nations and individuals alike.
There you have it friends, the bigger, more sinister plan that has been in the works at least as far back as 1963 but probably a lot longer, is finally seeing the fruit of its labor. All of this at the expense of our children and our society as a whole.
What will you do to PUSH BACK? We cannot stand for this any longer. You MUST get involved in your local area and FIGHT this communist takeover of our education and children. Our children DO NOT belong to the state or the federal government. They belong to their family!
You can start by signing our petition to STOP COMMON CORE
Then, you must attend your local school district meetings (whether you have children in the school or not). Finally contact your STATE legislators and let them know that you are vehemently against Common Core. It's time to bring our education back to the local/states control. Let's get the Feds out of our education system; it is Unconstitutional!
Be sure to sign our petition to STOP COMMON CORE!
Because these kids deserve the very best!
You can see from the "How is it Implemented in our 'States'?" flowchart, there are companies that will directly benefit by implementing Common Core. Some of these companies are:
* The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, pledged $150 million dollars in Grants in 2007. Bill and Melinda Gates are directly tied to the United Nations, and they will directly benefit from the software packages that are sold to train teachers in the classroom through Microsoft.
* Publishing Companies- Pearson, Scholastic News, MacGraw Hill, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, (AZ textbooks used in Public Schools are primarily from the publisher Harcourt) etc., will benefit from Common Core because they will provide the textbooks, for training teachers and teaching students, and curriculum changes that will need to be made to implement Common Core. Pearson, the largest on-line book company in the world, announced in their 2012 Earnings Report that "The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC)...awarded Pearson and Educational Testing Service (ETS) the contract to develop test items that will be part of the new English and Mathematics assessments to be administered from the 2014-2015 school year. We continued to produce strong growth in secure online testing, an important market for the future. We increased online testing volumes by more than 10%, delivering 6.5 million state accountability tests, 4.5 million constructed response items and 21 million spoken tests. We now assess oral proficiency in English, Spanish, French, Dutch, Arabic and Chinese. We also launched the Online Assessment Readiness Tool for the PARCC and the Smarter Balance Assessment Consortium (SBAC) Common Core consortia to help 45 states prepare for the transition to online assessments." Can you say more $$$ for Pearson???
* Achieve, Inc. connections- who will benefit from Common Core? Craig Barrett is the Chairman of the Board of Directors of Achieve, Inc., he is the current Chairman for the AZ Ready Education Council; and he is a Thunderbird Faculty member promoting United Nation Principles. (He is also the Former CEO/Chairman of the Board of Intel). Computer companies will directly benefit from computer sales to the states and local school districts. All of the Common Core student assessment testing will now be computer based. See (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers {PARCC} website for more details on the new student testing that will replace AIMS).
Source http://www.arizonansagainstcommoncore.com/Who_Behind_CC.html
COMMON CORE MOVEMENT IS A TROJAN HORSE AND TIED TO THE UNITED NATIONS (UN)
If you cannot see that Common Core is tied to the United Nations you have not done your homework! The major funder of the Common Core Movement is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which has pledged $60 million dollars to this effort. Bill and Melinda Gates are tied to UN through-and-through and have spent money in America and overseas for UN programs in Africa and all over the world for decades. Wake up and smell the koolaide you have been drinking and wake up that you are being lied to! Common Core is part of the UN's plan for complete federal control over our education systems and the "Dumbing-down" of America. Again, Wake up!
More Here http://www.arizonansagainstcommoncore.com/UN_connection.html
WISE WORDS
"The best means of forming a manly, virtuous, and happy people will be found in the right education of youth. Without this foundation, every other means, in my opinion, must fail." - George Washington
"Education is the key to unlock the golden door of freedom." - Benjamin Franklin
Communist Goals from Congressional Records 1963:
Note the items in RED as they apply to the Common Core Agenda...
Communist Goals (1963) Congressional Record--Appendix, pp. A34-A35 January 10, 1963
Current Communist Goals EXTENSION OF REMARKS OF HON. A. S. HERLONG, JR. OF FLORIDA IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES Thursday, January 10, 1963 .
Mr. HERLONG. Mr. Speaker, Mrs. Patricia Nordman of De Land, Fla., is an ardent and articulate opponent of communism, and until recently published the De Land Courier, which she dedicated to the purpose of alerting the public to the dangers of communism in America.
At Mrs. Nordman's request, I include in the RECORD, under unanimous consent, the following "Current Communist Goals," which she identifies as an excerpt from "The Naked Communist," by Cleon Skousen:
[From "The Naked Communist," by Cleon Skousen]
1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war.
2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war.
3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament [by] the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.
4. Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.
5. Extension of long-term loans to Russia and Soviet satellites.
6. Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination.
7. Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N.
8. Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev's promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N.
9. Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in progress.
10. Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N.
11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces. (Some Communist leaders believe the world can be taken over as easily by the U.N. as by Moscow. Sometimes these two centers compete with each other as they are now doing in the Congo.)
12. Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party.
13. Do away with all loyalty oaths.
14. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office.
15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.
16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.
17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers' associations. Put the party line in textbooks.
18. Gain control of all student newspapers.
19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.
20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policy-making positions.
21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.
22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to "eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms."
23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. "Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art."
24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them "censorship" and a violation of free speech and free press.
25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.
26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as "normal, natural, healthy."
27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with "social" religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity, which does not need a "religious crutch."
28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of "separation of church and state."
29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.
30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the "common man."
31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the "big picture." Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.
32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture--education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.
33. Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus.
34. Eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
35. Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI.
36. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.
37. Infiltrate and gain control of big business.
38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand [or treat].
39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.
40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.
41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.
42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use ["]united force["] to solve economic, political or social problems.
43. Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government.
44. Internationalize the Panama Canal.
45. Repeal the Connally reservation so the United States cannot prevent the World Court from seizing jurisdiction [over domestic problems. Give the World Court jurisdiction] over nations and individuals alike.
There you have it friends, the bigger, more sinister plan that has been in the works at least as far back as 1963 but probably a lot longer, is finally seeing the fruit of its labor. All of this at the expense of our children and our society as a whole.
What will you do to PUSH BACK? We cannot stand for this any longer. You MUST get involved in your local area and FIGHT this communist takeover of our education and children. Our children DO NOT belong to the state or the federal government. They belong to their family!
You can start by signing our petition to STOP COMMON CORE
Then, you must attend your local school district meetings (whether you have children in the school or not). Finally contact your STATE legislators and let them know that you are vehemently against Common Core. It's time to bring our education back to the local/states control. Let's get the Feds out of our education system; it is Unconstitutional!
Be sure to sign our petition to STOP COMMON CORE!
Because these kids deserve the very best!
Common-Core, Soaked in Commie Corruption.
Posted by Rev. Larry Wallenmeyer Admin II on March 26, 2014
Common-Core: The Obama-Care Of Education.
Remember when 2+2='d 4?
Well, now it's:
Take what you think is the number 2 and then imagine
going forward (what you think is) 2 spaces,
you should arrive at the number 4. but any number from 3-7
will do, or if you prefer, a letter may
be associated to your answer, so as to have
what you think is 2-ish plus (maybe) another 2-ish
to equal 6, or 3, or even Y.
Read the letter below from a father who is an ENGINEER!
http://l.yimg.com/os/publish-images/lifestyles/2014-03-25/8ef7c930-..."/>
=====================
Here's Another Letter Blasting Common-Core...
...From A Teacher!
======
Dear Dixie,
My purpose in sharing the article was to suggest that Utah’s State School Board, like so many boards and legislators nationwide, might consider halting or at least pausing Common Core as many other places are doing (or are seriously considering doing) given the amount of pushback that continues on this subject.
I am fully aware that Utah adopted Common Core!
Common Core is, frankly, evil posing as good. For the state school board to continue to deny this is either evidence of incompetence or it’s endorsement of these evils.
I do not use the word “evil” casually.
Common Core is evil because it is based on political power-grabbing that snuffed the voice of the people, a move that was based on dollar signs and not academic honesty. It was agreed to for a chance at federal cash.
It cannot back up its lies of “being an improvement” academically, since it’s totally experimental and untested. Similarly, it cannot back up its lie of being “internationally benchmarked” because it’s not internationally benchmarked.
It cannot back up its lie of being unattached to the federal government since it is tied like an umbilical cord to the Department of Education; the Dept. of Ed is officially partnered with the very group that created it (CCSSO) both in the standards and in common data technologies. The Department of Ed has contracts that mandate micromanagement of Common Core testing. There is much more –all documented online and you can prove or disprove it if you are honest enough to try.
And why should we– why should you, specifically, fight federal intrusion into education?
I am a teacher. Common Core diminishes teachers’ autonomy –and students’ well-being– through federally supervised testing that drives curriculum (or will, by next year when testing really kicks in) and by the federally funded SLDS data mining that amounts to “unreasonable search and seizure” of private effects.
While there are some harmless or even some good things in the standards themselves at the elementary school level perhaps, the standards do diminish classic literature especially for high schoolers, and they marginalize narrative writing, and dumb down high school math –as has been admitted even by its creators. (Click here to see this very short video link of this out loud admission of the math-dumbing, by Common Core creator Jason Zimba).
Even if this all were not true– if somehow standards did not diminish classic literature, marginalize narrative writing, and dumb down high school math, they are still AN ATROCITY, Dixie, from which you should be protecting the children of Utah. And the teachers of Utah.
Because they suffocate the spirit of liberty and independence.
1. COMMON CORE LACKS A REPRESENTATIVE AMENDMENT PROCESS.
If the Common Core Initiative was in harmony with the Constitution, it would be amendable by those governed by it.
Dixie, if this were legitimate, you and I would have a voice. But we do not.
Neither you as a state school board member, nor I as a Utah credentialed teacher, have diddly squat to say over what gets tested and taught in our math and English classrooms in Utah– because Common Core is only amendable by the NGA/CCSSO, according to their own words on their own creepy website.
Read it, for heaven’s sake! It states: “The Standards are intended to be a living work: as new and
better evidence emerges, the Standards will be revised.” (Revised by whom?)
Not you and not me.
Again, from the official Common Core site: (their caps, not mine) “ANY USE OF THE COMMON CORE STATE STANDARDS OTHER THAN AS AUTHORIZED UNDER THIS LICENSE OR COPYRIGHT LAW IS PROHIBITED. ANY PERSON WHO EXERCISES ANY RIGHTS TO THE COMMON CORE STATE STANDARDS THEREBY ACCEPTS AND AGREES TO BE BOUND BY THE TERMS… NGA Center/CCSSO shall be acknowledged as the sole owners and developers of the Common Core State Standards, and no claims to the contrary shall be made.”
2. IT LACKS CHECKS AND BALANCES. The use of checks and balances was designed to make it difficult for a minority of people to control the government and to restrain the government itself. If the Common Core Initiative– a nationalized system of standards, aligned tests, data collection and teacher accountability measures promoted federally– if this initiative were in harmony with the Constitution, it would not be held in the power of a minority of the people (of the NGA/CCSSO and of the Dept. of Ed which is partnered with CCSSO). It would have been vetted prior to implementation by the proper means outlined in the Constitution– but it wasn’t. As Alyson Williams pointed out, “There is no such thing in the U.S. Constitution as a council of governors… Governors working together to jointly address issues and create rules that affect the whole nation is not a legitimate alternative to Congress, our national representative body.”
3. IT LACKS AUTHORITY. If the Common Core Initiative was in harmony with the Constitution, it would have been born legitimately: but its only “authority” is the unprecedented assigning of money to the discretion of the Education Secretary without proper congressional oversight. From that Stimulus money came the State Fiscal Stabilization Fund and the Race to the Top grant programs that enabled the Department of Ed to get away with setting up their own, experimental rules for us to follow in exchange for the money – rules that normally would be determined by the States alone.
4. IT ALTERS THE LIMITS OF FEDERAL POWER. If the Common Core Initiative was in harmony with the Constitution, it would not be openly admitted even by its most notorious proponent, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, to alter the traditionally limited role of the federal government. Look:
Duncan said, in his 2010 “Vision of Education Reform” speech
: “Our vision of reform takes account of the fact that, in several respects, the governance of education in the United States is unusual. Traditionally, the federal government in the U.S. has had a limited role in education policy… The Obama administration has sought to fundamentally shift the federal role, so that the Department is doing much more… [THIS IS CLEARLY, CLEARLY UNCONSTITUTIONAL, DIXIE.] …the Recovery Act created additional competitive funding like the high-visibility $4.35 billion Race to the Top program and the $650 million Investing in Innovation Fund… America is now in the midst of a “quiet revolution” in school reform… In March of 2009, President Obama called on the nation’s governors and state school chiefs to develop standards and assessments… Virtually everyone thought the president was dreaming. But today, 37 states and the District of Columbia have already chosen to adopt the new state-crafted Common Core standards in math and English. Not studying it, not thinking about it, not issuing a white paper—they have actually done it.”
Do you hear Secretary Duncan gloating over his ability to control us?
Yet the honorable Utah State School Board continues to promote the notion that we are free under Common Core. It’s a lie. The State School Board may be full of very good people like yourself, who donate to Sub-for-Santa and read to their grandchildren; but they are still guilty of passing along huge lies which they have received and believed from the pushers of the Common Core gold rush.
Common Core governance is a slap in the face to the work of the Founding Fathers.
We are rightly shuddering at the math disaster and the high-stakes testing, are rightly gasping at the lack of any cost analysis to taxpayers and at the privacy-robbing aspects of the Common Core agenda. But these arguments are secondary to the hairiest of the reform devils, the destruction of individual liberty and the end of local control of education.
Dixie, my dear representative! Please, please stand up to these people. Stop swallowing the hogwash. Stop allowing your peers on the board to spread the propaganda. It is not based in truth.
Christel Swasey
Utah Teacher
Common-Core: The Obama-Care Of Education.
Remember when 2+2='d 4?
Well, now it's:
Take what you think is the number 2 and then imagine
going forward (what you think is) 2 spaces,
you should arrive at the number 4. but any number from 3-7
will do, or if you prefer, a letter may
be associated to your answer, so as to have
what you think is 2-ish plus (maybe) another 2-ish
to equal 6, or 3, or even Y.
Read the letter below from a father who is an ENGINEER!
http://l.yimg.com/os/publish-images/lifestyles/2014-03-25/8ef7c930-..."/>
=====================
Here's Another Letter Blasting Common-Core...
...From A Teacher!
======
Dear Dixie,
My purpose in sharing the article was to suggest that Utah’s State School Board, like so many boards and legislators nationwide, might consider halting or at least pausing Common Core as many other places are doing (or are seriously considering doing) given the amount of pushback that continues on this subject.
I am fully aware that Utah adopted Common Core!
Common Core is, frankly, evil posing as good. For the state school board to continue to deny this is either evidence of incompetence or it’s endorsement of these evils.
I do not use the word “evil” casually.
Common Core is evil because it is based on political power-grabbing that snuffed the voice of the people, a move that was based on dollar signs and not academic honesty. It was agreed to for a chance at federal cash.
It cannot back up its lies of “being an improvement” academically, since it’s totally experimental and untested. Similarly, it cannot back up its lie of being “internationally benchmarked” because it’s not internationally benchmarked.
It cannot back up its lie of being unattached to the federal government since it is tied like an umbilical cord to the Department of Education; the Dept. of Ed is officially partnered with the very group that created it (CCSSO) both in the standards and in common data technologies. The Department of Ed has contracts that mandate micromanagement of Common Core testing. There is much more –all documented online and you can prove or disprove it if you are honest enough to try.
And why should we– why should you, specifically, fight federal intrusion into education?
I am a teacher. Common Core diminishes teachers’ autonomy –and students’ well-being– through federally supervised testing that drives curriculum (or will, by next year when testing really kicks in) and by the federally funded SLDS data mining that amounts to “unreasonable search and seizure” of private effects.
While there are some harmless or even some good things in the standards themselves at the elementary school level perhaps, the standards do diminish classic literature especially for high schoolers, and they marginalize narrative writing, and dumb down high school math –as has been admitted even by its creators. (Click here to see this very short video link of this out loud admission of the math-dumbing, by Common Core creator Jason Zimba).
Even if this all were not true– if somehow standards did not diminish classic literature, marginalize narrative writing, and dumb down high school math, they are still AN ATROCITY, Dixie, from which you should be protecting the children of Utah. And the teachers of Utah.
Because they suffocate the spirit of liberty and independence.
1. COMMON CORE LACKS A REPRESENTATIVE AMENDMENT PROCESS.
If the Common Core Initiative was in harmony with the Constitution, it would be amendable by those governed by it.
Dixie, if this were legitimate, you and I would have a voice. But we do not.
Neither you as a state school board member, nor I as a Utah credentialed teacher, have diddly squat to say over what gets tested and taught in our math and English classrooms in Utah– because Common Core is only amendable by the NGA/CCSSO, according to their own words on their own creepy website.
Read it, for heaven’s sake! It states: “The Standards are intended to be a living work: as new and
better evidence emerges, the Standards will be revised.” (Revised by whom?)
Not you and not me.
Again, from the official Common Core site: (their caps, not mine) “ANY USE OF THE COMMON CORE STATE STANDARDS OTHER THAN AS AUTHORIZED UNDER THIS LICENSE OR COPYRIGHT LAW IS PROHIBITED. ANY PERSON WHO EXERCISES ANY RIGHTS TO THE COMMON CORE STATE STANDARDS THEREBY ACCEPTS AND AGREES TO BE BOUND BY THE TERMS… NGA Center/CCSSO shall be acknowledged as the sole owners and developers of the Common Core State Standards, and no claims to the contrary shall be made.”
2. IT LACKS CHECKS AND BALANCES. The use of checks and balances was designed to make it difficult for a minority of people to control the government and to restrain the government itself. If the Common Core Initiative– a nationalized system of standards, aligned tests, data collection and teacher accountability measures promoted federally– if this initiative were in harmony with the Constitution, it would not be held in the power of a minority of the people (of the NGA/CCSSO and of the Dept. of Ed which is partnered with CCSSO). It would have been vetted prior to implementation by the proper means outlined in the Constitution– but it wasn’t. As Alyson Williams pointed out, “There is no such thing in the U.S. Constitution as a council of governors… Governors working together to jointly address issues and create rules that affect the whole nation is not a legitimate alternative to Congress, our national representative body.”
3. IT LACKS AUTHORITY. If the Common Core Initiative was in harmony with the Constitution, it would have been born legitimately: but its only “authority” is the unprecedented assigning of money to the discretion of the Education Secretary without proper congressional oversight. From that Stimulus money came the State Fiscal Stabilization Fund and the Race to the Top grant programs that enabled the Department of Ed to get away with setting up their own, experimental rules for us to follow in exchange for the money – rules that normally would be determined by the States alone.
4. IT ALTERS THE LIMITS OF FEDERAL POWER. If the Common Core Initiative was in harmony with the Constitution, it would not be openly admitted even by its most notorious proponent, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, to alter the traditionally limited role of the federal government. Look:
Duncan said, in his 2010 “Vision of Education Reform” speech
: “Our vision of reform takes account of the fact that, in several respects, the governance of education in the United States is unusual. Traditionally, the federal government in the U.S. has had a limited role in education policy… The Obama administration has sought to fundamentally shift the federal role, so that the Department is doing much more… [THIS IS CLEARLY, CLEARLY UNCONSTITUTIONAL, DIXIE.] …the Recovery Act created additional competitive funding like the high-visibility $4.35 billion Race to the Top program and the $650 million Investing in Innovation Fund… America is now in the midst of a “quiet revolution” in school reform… In March of 2009, President Obama called on the nation’s governors and state school chiefs to develop standards and assessments… Virtually everyone thought the president was dreaming. But today, 37 states and the District of Columbia have already chosen to adopt the new state-crafted Common Core standards in math and English. Not studying it, not thinking about it, not issuing a white paper—they have actually done it.”
Do you hear Secretary Duncan gloating over his ability to control us?
Yet the honorable Utah State School Board continues to promote the notion that we are free under Common Core. It’s a lie. The State School Board may be full of very good people like yourself, who donate to Sub-for-Santa and read to their grandchildren; but they are still guilty of passing along huge lies which they have received and believed from the pushers of the Common Core gold rush.
Common Core governance is a slap in the face to the work of the Founding Fathers.
We are rightly shuddering at the math disaster and the high-stakes testing, are rightly gasping at the lack of any cost analysis to taxpayers and at the privacy-robbing aspects of the Common Core agenda. But these arguments are secondary to the hairiest of the reform devils, the destruction of individual liberty and the end of local control of education.
Dixie, my dear representative! Please, please stand up to these people. Stop swallowing the hogwash. Stop allowing your peers on the board to spread the propaganda. It is not based in truth.
Christel Swasey
Utah Teacher
THE CHART TO PROVE IT: FED TAKEOVER OF AMERICA'S SCHOOLS
Posted by Donna Gail Garner on March 25, 2014
On June 25, 2006, Warren Buffett (the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway and then the richest man in the world) began giving away his billions to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: http://money.cnn.com/2006/06/25/magazines/fortune/charity1.fortune/
On July 8, 2013, Warren Buffett gave another $2 Billion to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/07/08/buffett-gives-2-billion-to-g...
These huge gifts from Buffett combined with the vast wealth and the ideology of the Gates’ Foundation together with the social justice agenda of the Obama administration have led to the federal takeover of our nation’s schools (public, charter, private, homeschools) through the Common Core Standards Initiative.
Because of the future alignment of the 2016 SAT led by David Coleman, the lead writer of the Common Core Standards for English, even the non-public schools are falling in line with the CCSI.
Now we have the chart to prove it -- “How Bill Gates Bought the Common Core” --
http://honestpracticum.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/How-Bill-Gate...
Please be sure to use the zoom button to enlarge each part of the chart.
Experts who know say that because of quirks on the Gates Foundation database, the amounts on the chart should be even higher. In his 3.15.14 article entitled “Why Bill Gates Defends the Common Core,” Jack Hassard calculates the total as being closer to $2.3 Billion --http://www.artofteachingscience.org/why-bill-gates-defends-the-comm...
ACTION STEP: It is not too late yet; but the public must continue to rise up, opt their children out of the Common Core assessments, refuse to allow their children’s personal and identifiable information to be captured by the federal government, and do everything they possibly can to offset and undercut the Common Core indoctrination of our nation’s children.
Donna Garner
On June 25, 2006, Warren Buffett (the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway and then the richest man in the world) began giving away his billions to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: http://money.cnn.com/2006/06/25/magazines/fortune/charity1.fortune/
On July 8, 2013, Warren Buffett gave another $2 Billion to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/07/08/buffett-gives-2-billion-to-g...
These huge gifts from Buffett combined with the vast wealth and the ideology of the Gates’ Foundation together with the social justice agenda of the Obama administration have led to the federal takeover of our nation’s schools (public, charter, private, homeschools) through the Common Core Standards Initiative.
Because of the future alignment of the 2016 SAT led by David Coleman, the lead writer of the Common Core Standards for English, even the non-public schools are falling in line with the CCSI.
Now we have the chart to prove it -- “How Bill Gates Bought the Common Core” --
http://honestpracticum.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/How-Bill-Gate...
Please be sure to use the zoom button to enlarge each part of the chart.
Experts who know say that because of quirks on the Gates Foundation database, the amounts on the chart should be even higher. In his 3.15.14 article entitled “Why Bill Gates Defends the Common Core,” Jack Hassard calculates the total as being closer to $2.3 Billion --http://www.artofteachingscience.org/why-bill-gates-defends-the-comm...
ACTION STEP: It is not too late yet; but the public must continue to rise up, opt their children out of the Common Core assessments, refuse to allow their children’s personal and identifiable information to be captured by the federal government, and do everything they possibly can to offset and undercut the Common Core indoctrination of our nation’s children.
Donna Garner
ANGRY MOM: Lady Destroys Common Core by Writing This on Son’s Test
This mom has a few select words for her son’s math homework. See how she utterly destroys common core in just a few sentences.
Via Allen B West
Read more at http://clashdaily.com/2014/03/angry-mom-lady-destroys-common-core-writing-sons-test/#wfkyOq3x5Y8CkTPM.99
Via Allen B West
Read more at http://clashdaily.com/2014/03/angry-mom-lady-destroys-common-core-writing-sons-test/#wfkyOq3x5Y8CkTPM.99
The Seven Abilities Your Child
Needs to Succeed
How do you set your child up for educational success?
This is a question that all parents grapple with. And it's one that we at TestingMom.com hear from parents of all stripes. TestingMom.com is a web site co-founded by Karen Quinn (aka The Testing Mom) who is a NY Times best-selling author, testing authority and mother of two. The Testing Mom website provides homeschool parents and their children access to curriculum based materials for all 50 states and online school enrichment activities for pre-K to 6th grade.
At TestingMom.com, we understand that setting up your child up for educational success is an especially urgent topic for homeschooling parents, given that we are solely responsible for our children's education. There are no teachers or school administrators we can turn to when we run into problems or find ourselves unsure of the material we're using to educate our children. This is true even for homeschooled children who are gifted.
But sometimes, as parents and homeschoolers, we tend to overthink things and to miss the forest for the trees. It's inevitable that you'll doubt the curriculum you're using for your child at least once – and probably much more than that! The good news is that there are seven core skills that are central to school success for any child, whether home-schooled or otherwise. By building these skills in your child, you'll ensure that she has a solid foundation for school and for life. Today we want to share these skills and how you can use them to help your child break away from the pack!
Also, Testing Mom holds periodic webinars covering this very topic – The Seven Abilities Your Child Needs for Testing and School Success! For parents of younger children, we also offer a webinar on How to Get Your Child Kindergarten-Ready. You can register for the Seven Abilities webinar here or for the kindergarten webinar here.
Without further delay, let's get down to the seven abilities!
http://www.homeschool.com/articles/testingmom/
This is a question that all parents grapple with. And it's one that we at TestingMom.com hear from parents of all stripes. TestingMom.com is a web site co-founded by Karen Quinn (aka The Testing Mom) who is a NY Times best-selling author, testing authority and mother of two. The Testing Mom website provides homeschool parents and their children access to curriculum based materials for all 50 states and online school enrichment activities for pre-K to 6th grade.
At TestingMom.com, we understand that setting up your child up for educational success is an especially urgent topic for homeschooling parents, given that we are solely responsible for our children's education. There are no teachers or school administrators we can turn to when we run into problems or find ourselves unsure of the material we're using to educate our children. This is true even for homeschooled children who are gifted.
But sometimes, as parents and homeschoolers, we tend to overthink things and to miss the forest for the trees. It's inevitable that you'll doubt the curriculum you're using for your child at least once – and probably much more than that! The good news is that there are seven core skills that are central to school success for any child, whether home-schooled or otherwise. By building these skills in your child, you'll ensure that she has a solid foundation for school and for life. Today we want to share these skills and how you can use them to help your child break away from the pack!
Also, Testing Mom holds periodic webinars covering this very topic – The Seven Abilities Your Child Needs for Testing and School Success! For parents of younger children, we also offer a webinar on How to Get Your Child Kindergarten-Ready. You can register for the Seven Abilities webinar here or for the kindergarten webinar here.
Without further delay, let's get down to the seven abilities!
http://www.homeschool.com/articles/testingmom/
Common Core’s Little Green Soldiers
March 4, 2014 by Mary Grabar
Remember the children singing praise songs to Obama back in 2008? Remember young teenage boys marching in formation and shouting out thanks to Obama for their promising futures?
The appointment of Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education initially was seen as a savvy bipartisan move. But under his watch the Department of Education has become a propaganda arm used to influence the next generation to accept the idea of catastrophic man-made climate change as per the UN, the Environmental Protection Agency, and such groups as the National Wildlife Federation.
In a multi-pronged approach, the Department is teaming up with various non-profit and government organizations and curriculum companies to promote “fun” contests and activities for students, while promoting the next phase of Common Core “State Standards”—in science.
For example, the Department’s latest Green Strides newsletter (February 28) announced three contests for K-12 students who display their agreement with the government’s position on climate change.
In that newsletter, the Department of Education announced that another federal agency, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and its National Environmental Education Foundation, have “launched an exciting video challenge for middle school students called Climate Change in Focus.” In this contest, middle school students are asked to make a video that “expresses why they care about climate change and what they are doing to reduce emissions or to prepare for its impacts.” To win loyalty to the EPA, it is announced that winning videos will be highlighted on the EPA website. The effort sounds like the kids’ cereal box promotions of yore: the top three entries will receive “cool prizes like a solar charging backpack,” winning class projects will receive special recognition for their school, and the first 100 entrants will receive a year’s subscription to National Geographic Kids Magazine.
Another contest, National Wildlife Federation’s Young Reporters for the Environment, invites students “between the ages of 13-21 to report on an environmental issue in their community in an article, photo or photo essay, or short video.” Entries should “reflect firsthand investigation of topics related to the environment and sustainability in the students’ own communities, draw connections between local and global perspectives, and propose solutions.”
Students are also encouraged to make nominations for “Champions of the Earth,” a “UN-sponsored award for environment, Green Economy, and sustainability.” Among the 2013 laureates are Martha Isabel Ruiz Corzo, who orchestrated a public-private biosphere reserve status for a region in Mexico, and Brian McLendon, of Google Earth.
Students already get exposed to climate change and sustainability in textbooks which are bought with taxpayer funds, as well as in videos and online materials produced by taxpayer-supported Public Broadcasting. Many students, of course, have had to sit through Al Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.
Quite obviously, a middle school student does not have the necessary scientific knowledge to make videos about climate change—a particularly challenging scientific problem.
The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)—the next phase of Common Core—will make the situation worse, however. Students will be even less capable of distinguishing science from propaganda. These standards, like those for math and English Language Arts, were produced by Achieve, a nonprofit education group started by corporate leaders and some governors.
As in the standards for English Language Arts and math, the NGSS are intended to be transformative, or as Appendix A states, “to reflect a new vision for American science education.” They call for new “performance expectations” that “focus on understanding and applications as opposed to memorization of facts devoid of context.”
It is precisely such short shrift to knowledge (dismissively referred to as “memorization”) to which science professors Lawrence S. Lerner and Paul Gross object. The standards bypass essential math skills in favor of “process,” they asserted last fall at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation blog.
Common Core standards, in all disciplines, are written with a lot of fluff to conceal their emptiness.
Lerner and Gross discovered “inconsistency between strong NGSS (and Appendix C) assertions and what was actually found by the mathematicians, among others, of our reviewing group.”
(The Common Core math standards themselves have garnered much criticism among teachers, parents, and students; focusing so much on “process,” they make simple problems bizarrely confusing, as a collection of examples illustrates.)
Lerner and Gross condemn the “Slighting of mathematics,” which does “increasing mischief as grade level rises, especially in the physical sciences.” Physics is “effectively absent” at the high school level.
“Several devout declarations” appear, however, the authors sardonically point out, as they note this one from Appendix C:
In particular, the best science education seems to be one based on integrating rigorous content with the practices that scientists and engineers routinely use in their work—including application of mathematics.
Lerner and Gross attack the “practices” strategy, as an extension of the “inquiry learning” of the early 1990s, which had “no notable effect on the (mediocre) performance of American students in national and international science assessments.”
With some sarcasm, they write, “It is charming to say ‘. . . students learn science effectively when they actively engage in the practices of science.’” However,
Students will not learn best if they practice science exactly as do real scientists. A firm conclusion in cognitive science contradicts that claim. Beginners don’t and can’t ‘practice’ as do experts. The practices of experts exploit prior experience and extensive build-up in long-term memory of scaffolding: facts, procedures, technical know-how, solutions to standard problems in the field, vocabularies—of knowledge in short.
Not only do the Next Generation Science Standards shirk the necessary foundations in math and science knowledge, but they explicitly call for including ideological lessons, such as “Human impacts on Earth systems.” For grades K-2, students are to understand, “Things people do can affect the environment but they can make choices to reduce their impact.” In grades 3 through 5, students will learn “Societal activities have had major effects on the land, ocean, atmosphere, and even outer space. Societal activities can also help protect Earth’s resources and environments.” This is from part ESS3.C of the NGSS standards.
“Human impacts on Earth systems” are huge topics, when approached legitimately. They present quandaries to scientists at the top levels. Yet NGSS imposes them on kindergartners. The objective, of course, is not teaching legitimate science, but indoctrination.
Amazingly, ten states have already voluntarily adopted the Standards.
Such efforts, coordinated by the Department of Education, threaten the future of science itself.
Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/mary-grabar/common-cores-little-green-soldiers/
Remember the children singing praise songs to Obama back in 2008? Remember young teenage boys marching in formation and shouting out thanks to Obama for their promising futures?
The appointment of Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education initially was seen as a savvy bipartisan move. But under his watch the Department of Education has become a propaganda arm used to influence the next generation to accept the idea of catastrophic man-made climate change as per the UN, the Environmental Protection Agency, and such groups as the National Wildlife Federation.
In a multi-pronged approach, the Department is teaming up with various non-profit and government organizations and curriculum companies to promote “fun” contests and activities for students, while promoting the next phase of Common Core “State Standards”—in science.
For example, the Department’s latest Green Strides newsletter (February 28) announced three contests for K-12 students who display their agreement with the government’s position on climate change.
In that newsletter, the Department of Education announced that another federal agency, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and its National Environmental Education Foundation, have “launched an exciting video challenge for middle school students called Climate Change in Focus.” In this contest, middle school students are asked to make a video that “expresses why they care about climate change and what they are doing to reduce emissions or to prepare for its impacts.” To win loyalty to the EPA, it is announced that winning videos will be highlighted on the EPA website. The effort sounds like the kids’ cereal box promotions of yore: the top three entries will receive “cool prizes like a solar charging backpack,” winning class projects will receive special recognition for their school, and the first 100 entrants will receive a year’s subscription to National Geographic Kids Magazine.
Another contest, National Wildlife Federation’s Young Reporters for the Environment, invites students “between the ages of 13-21 to report on an environmental issue in their community in an article, photo or photo essay, or short video.” Entries should “reflect firsthand investigation of topics related to the environment and sustainability in the students’ own communities, draw connections between local and global perspectives, and propose solutions.”
Students are also encouraged to make nominations for “Champions of the Earth,” a “UN-sponsored award for environment, Green Economy, and sustainability.” Among the 2013 laureates are Martha Isabel Ruiz Corzo, who orchestrated a public-private biosphere reserve status for a region in Mexico, and Brian McLendon, of Google Earth.
Students already get exposed to climate change and sustainability in textbooks which are bought with taxpayer funds, as well as in videos and online materials produced by taxpayer-supported Public Broadcasting. Many students, of course, have had to sit through Al Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.
Quite obviously, a middle school student does not have the necessary scientific knowledge to make videos about climate change—a particularly challenging scientific problem.
The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)—the next phase of Common Core—will make the situation worse, however. Students will be even less capable of distinguishing science from propaganda. These standards, like those for math and English Language Arts, were produced by Achieve, a nonprofit education group started by corporate leaders and some governors.
As in the standards for English Language Arts and math, the NGSS are intended to be transformative, or as Appendix A states, “to reflect a new vision for American science education.” They call for new “performance expectations” that “focus on understanding and applications as opposed to memorization of facts devoid of context.”
It is precisely such short shrift to knowledge (dismissively referred to as “memorization”) to which science professors Lawrence S. Lerner and Paul Gross object. The standards bypass essential math skills in favor of “process,” they asserted last fall at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation blog.
Common Core standards, in all disciplines, are written with a lot of fluff to conceal their emptiness.
Lerner and Gross discovered “inconsistency between strong NGSS (and Appendix C) assertions and what was actually found by the mathematicians, among others, of our reviewing group.”
(The Common Core math standards themselves have garnered much criticism among teachers, parents, and students; focusing so much on “process,” they make simple problems bizarrely confusing, as a collection of examples illustrates.)
Lerner and Gross condemn the “Slighting of mathematics,” which does “increasing mischief as grade level rises, especially in the physical sciences.” Physics is “effectively absent” at the high school level.
“Several devout declarations” appear, however, the authors sardonically point out, as they note this one from Appendix C:
In particular, the best science education seems to be one based on integrating rigorous content with the practices that scientists and engineers routinely use in their work—including application of mathematics.
Lerner and Gross attack the “practices” strategy, as an extension of the “inquiry learning” of the early 1990s, which had “no notable effect on the (mediocre) performance of American students in national and international science assessments.”
With some sarcasm, they write, “It is charming to say ‘. . . students learn science effectively when they actively engage in the practices of science.’” However,
Students will not learn best if they practice science exactly as do real scientists. A firm conclusion in cognitive science contradicts that claim. Beginners don’t and can’t ‘practice’ as do experts. The practices of experts exploit prior experience and extensive build-up in long-term memory of scaffolding: facts, procedures, technical know-how, solutions to standard problems in the field, vocabularies—of knowledge in short.
Not only do the Next Generation Science Standards shirk the necessary foundations in math and science knowledge, but they explicitly call for including ideological lessons, such as “Human impacts on Earth systems.” For grades K-2, students are to understand, “Things people do can affect the environment but they can make choices to reduce their impact.” In grades 3 through 5, students will learn “Societal activities have had major effects on the land, ocean, atmosphere, and even outer space. Societal activities can also help protect Earth’s resources and environments.” This is from part ESS3.C of the NGSS standards.
“Human impacts on Earth systems” are huge topics, when approached legitimately. They present quandaries to scientists at the top levels. Yet NGSS imposes them on kindergartners. The objective, of course, is not teaching legitimate science, but indoctrination.
Amazingly, ten states have already voluntarily adopted the Standards.
Such efforts, coordinated by the Department of Education, threaten the future of science itself.
Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/mary-grabar/common-cores-little-green-soldiers/
EPIC OBLITERATION OF COMMON CORE: Watch NC’s Dan Forest Shred This UnAmerican Crap
By Clash Daily / 26 February 2014
North Carolina’s Lt. Governor Dan Forest gave testimony in front of the NCGA LRC Study Committee on Common Core State Standards in North Carolina, warning that a one-size fits all approach to educational standards is just plain un-American and just plain won’t work in our diverse country.
Check out the video of the testimony and the written transcript. Share it with your friends. America needs to hear this message.
“In the end it will not be standards that change our education system, but a wholesale, fundamental shift in the way we educate. Mastery Based learning, removing excessive, high-stakes testing and unnecessary mandates from our classrooms, treating our teachers like professionals, customizing curriculum to our students gifts, needs and desires. These are things that are going to transform education. Let’s put standards in their proper place and then get down to business,” said Forest.
Via Rowan Free Press
Read more at http://clashdaily.com/2014/02/epic-obliteration-common-core-watch-ncs-dan-forest-shred-unamerican-crap/#ITGZ1tpgurx2BpSj.99
Check out the video of the testimony and the written transcript. Share it with your friends. America needs to hear this message.
“In the end it will not be standards that change our education system, but a wholesale, fundamental shift in the way we educate. Mastery Based learning, removing excessive, high-stakes testing and unnecessary mandates from our classrooms, treating our teachers like professionals, customizing curriculum to our students gifts, needs and desires. These are things that are going to transform education. Let’s put standards in their proper place and then get down to business,” said Forest.
Via Rowan Free Press
Read more at http://clashdaily.com/2014/02/epic-obliteration-common-core-watch-ncs-dan-forest-shred-unamerican-crap/#ITGZ1tpgurx2BpSj.99
Despite proven academic success of NYC’s charter schools, the mayor and unions have started a war on city’s charter kids
by Mark J. Perry
Success Academy Charters Grades Black (%) Hispanic (%) Free Lunch (%) Statewide Performance (%)
Harlem Success Academy 1 K-6 80.1 17 77.7 97
Harlem Success Academy 2 K-4 77.9 20 75 96.8
Harlem Success Academy 3 K-4 64.3 30.9 80 97.5
Harlem Success Academy 4 K-5 73.5 20 78.5 97.1
The profiles of four Harlem charter schools, operated by Success Academy Charter Schools are displayed above, based on data from the SchoolDigger website and national school database. All four Harlem Success Academy charters serve primarily minority student populations (all are 93.5 to 97.1% black and Hispanic) and low-income households (75 to 80% of students qualify for free or reduced lunch), and yet all are ranked higher than about 97% of schools in New York state.
What a truly amazing academic success story!
Q: With those kinds of impressive results for some of the city's most at-risk student populations in Harlem, couldn't that proven record of academic success be replicated in all public schools? Wouldn't you think that these Harlem charter schools would be recognized as models of academic success for the rest of the city and the state?
A: In a more sane world where students and learning are the No. 1 priority, the educational establishment would be "falling all over itself" to copy the proven educational success of charter schools like the ones in Harlem profiled above. But in the insane world of New York City, the liberal mayor and liberal teacher unions are waging a war on the city's successful charter schools like the ones operated by Success Academy Charter Schools. Preservation of the status quo and a continuation of the current failed public school model, and preserving its power, are the primary concerns of the teachers unions and their administrative enablers, which now includes the new New York mayor.
Q: What's happened, I thought liberals were supposed to be the ones who most want to help, not hurt minorities and poor people? How does waging a war on minority charter kids from low-income households in NYC fit into the liberal agenda?
Mark J. Perry | March 1, 2014 at 1:31 pm | URL: http://wp.me/p2x8s8-wDc
Success Academy Charters Grades Black (%) Hispanic (%) Free Lunch (%) Statewide Performance (%)
Harlem Success Academy 1 K-6 80.1 17 77.7 97
Harlem Success Academy 2 K-4 77.9 20 75 96.8
Harlem Success Academy 3 K-4 64.3 30.9 80 97.5
Harlem Success Academy 4 K-5 73.5 20 78.5 97.1
The profiles of four Harlem charter schools, operated by Success Academy Charter Schools are displayed above, based on data from the SchoolDigger website and national school database. All four Harlem Success Academy charters serve primarily minority student populations (all are 93.5 to 97.1% black and Hispanic) and low-income households (75 to 80% of students qualify for free or reduced lunch), and yet all are ranked higher than about 97% of schools in New York state.
What a truly amazing academic success story!
Q: With those kinds of impressive results for some of the city's most at-risk student populations in Harlem, couldn't that proven record of academic success be replicated in all public schools? Wouldn't you think that these Harlem charter schools would be recognized as models of academic success for the rest of the city and the state?
A: In a more sane world where students and learning are the No. 1 priority, the educational establishment would be "falling all over itself" to copy the proven educational success of charter schools like the ones in Harlem profiled above. But in the insane world of New York City, the liberal mayor and liberal teacher unions are waging a war on the city's successful charter schools like the ones operated by Success Academy Charter Schools. Preservation of the status quo and a continuation of the current failed public school model, and preserving its power, are the primary concerns of the teachers unions and their administrative enablers, which now includes the new New York mayor.
Q: What's happened, I thought liberals were supposed to be the ones who most want to help, not hurt minorities and poor people? How does waging a war on minority charter kids from low-income households in NYC fit into the liberal agenda?
Mark J. Perry | March 1, 2014 at 1:31 pm | URL: http://wp.me/p2x8s8-wDc
2.5 Million Students Now in Charter Schools
The number of American students now attending public charter schools has surpassed 2.5 million as more than 600 new schools opened for the 2013-14 school year.
Ten years ago there were only 790,000 charter school students.
An estimated 288,000 additional students are attending public charter schools in this school year compared to the previous school year, according to a report from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.
There are now about 6,400 public charter schools across the country, and this year's "7 percent growth in the number of operating public charter schools and 13 percent growth in public charter school student enrollment are demonstrations of parents' demand for high-quality educational options," the report states.
The report takes into account the fact that about 200 public charter schools that were open in the last school year did not open their doors to students this fall.
Among the reasons for closure are low enrollment, financial concerns, and low academic performance.
"The closures provide evidence that the charter school bargain works; schools that do not meet the needs of their students are closed," the report observes.
California opened the most new charters for this school year, 104, bringing in 48,000 additional students. Arizona was next with 87 new charters, followed by Florida (75), Texas (52), and Ohio (45).
California has 1,130 charter schools, with a student population of 519,000. Florida is second with 625 charters.
Every state now has a charter school. Iowa has the fewest at three, Wyoming has four, and Maine has five.
Proponents of public charter schools also got a boost with the release of a report from the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, which disclosed that charters in New York City have outperformed district public schools in 29 out of 36 performance categories over the last three years.
Ten years ago there were only 790,000 charter school students.
An estimated 288,000 additional students are attending public charter schools in this school year compared to the previous school year, according to a report from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.
There are now about 6,400 public charter schools across the country, and this year's "7 percent growth in the number of operating public charter schools and 13 percent growth in public charter school student enrollment are demonstrations of parents' demand for high-quality educational options," the report states.
The report takes into account the fact that about 200 public charter schools that were open in the last school year did not open their doors to students this fall.
Among the reasons for closure are low enrollment, financial concerns, and low academic performance.
"The closures provide evidence that the charter school bargain works; schools that do not meet the needs of their students are closed," the report observes.
California opened the most new charters for this school year, 104, bringing in 48,000 additional students. Arizona was next with 87 new charters, followed by Florida (75), Texas (52), and Ohio (45).
California has 1,130 charter schools, with a student population of 519,000. Florida is second with 625 charters.
Every state now has a charter school. Iowa has the fewest at three, Wyoming has four, and Maine has five.
Proponents of public charter schools also got a boost with the release of a report from the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, which disclosed that charters in New York City have outperformed district public schools in 29 out of 36 performance categories over the last three years.
Beware Of Commies Bearing Gifts
By Roseann Salanitri on February 26, 2014 in Education, RoseAnn Salanitri
There is an old saying that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. While that may be true in some situations, it’s not true in all situations. The fight against Common Core State Standards (CCSS) is a perfect example of why we shouldn’t be so quick to embrace everyone fighting against CCSS as an ally. For instance, The Badass Teachers Association (BAT) is the curious name of a group that may seem like our allies because they are fighting against CCSS, but allies are not always what they seem to be. On their website (http://www.badassteacher.org/) they state:
“This association is for every teacher who refuses to be blamed for the failure of our society to erase poverty and inequality, and refuses to accept assessments, tests and evaluations imposed by those who have contempt for real teaching and learning…”
Make no mistake about it, the BAT may be fighting in this battle but their primary aim is to protect their own jobs and reduce accountability. Their philosophy can be labeled as Stop-the-Test-and-Keep-the-Core, since they do not object to the standards but only the testing. Worse, their underlying focus may be more sinister. The first red flag you may encounter when visiting their site is their symbol, which is distinctively Communist and set against a red background. The next disturbing bit of information jumps out if you visit their “About Us” tab (http://www.badassteacher.org/?page_id=14) and click on the second video. At the end of the video they claim they are “Legion.” For those who are not familiar with the Bible passage where Jesus casts out demons, those demons identify themselves as “Legion.” If these were the only two disconcerting red flags, they would be disconcerting but could be dismissed as alarming coincidences. However, there is more. Before going further, it is necessary to state that not all members of the BAT are as vile as some. There are most likely a large number that have not done the research I have done and aren’t aware of the background of their co-founder and other progressives that they have joined forces with.
The co-founder of BAT is Mark Naison. Naison is no stranger to political activisim. His roots go back to the Weather Underground Organization (WUO) and associates like Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorn. They are anarchists, opportunists, communists, and murders who managed to mentor a young Barack Obama for the White House. While Naison tried to distance himself from the WUO early on out of fear of possible imprisonment, it should be noted that he attended the WUO reunion in 1988. Like many of his counterparts (including Bill Ayers), Naison is a college professor. He is currently teaching at the well-respected Fordham University in New York and is Chair of African and African-American Studies. While his supporting the CCSS-loving Bill de Blassio may seem duplicitous, his background, support of unions, and detest of charter schools tells us that this is a man that may not be what we would like him to be. What is even more disturbing is that TEA Parties right here in New Jersey and the Metro area have invited this man to speak at their meetings – with great accolades of his effectiveness as a speaker. Perhaps someone should remind them that the road to hell is paved with good speakers, ie. Hitler, Mussolini, and of course Barack Obama.
The red flags don’t end with Naison or BAT, there are concerning “coincidences” between Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and the WUO that should not be overlooked. In order to establish these “coincidences”, I will discuss the long-forgotten objectives of the WUO.
The goal of the WUO was to create a revolutionary party to overthrow the “imperial” and capitalistic US government and to create a classless world – translation: Communism. Part of their strategy was to co-opt the anti-Viet Nam war and civil rights movement back in the 1960s. They managed to align themselves with the Black Liberation Movement and labeling those in opposition “racists”, a philosophy that BO’s mentor Jeremiah Wright also embraced. Their underlying plan was to overthrow capitalism by transmitting radical ideas to the working class by involving masses of people. They may have appeared to be anarchists but in actuality, they were/are anti-capitalist – like the 99% of Occupy Wall Street.
John Jacobs, a War Council member of the WUO, stated: “We’re against everything that’s good and decent in honky America…” To a very large degree their goals have been manifested in the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the White House, as well as and labeling their opposition (the TEA party) as racists. The WUO’s view of imperialism was based on Lenin’s “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism” published in 1916, and set forth in their founding document “You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows.” It echoes Lenin’s philosophy that wealth belongs to the oppressed people (the 99%) who are the creators of the wealth of the empire. The WUO goes further by vilifying “white privilege” and creating identity politics. It used the unrest in poor black neighborhoods by infiltrating and injecting them with a victim mentality and vilifying others that they labeled racists.
What is curious is that this anti-capitalist anti-white movement has begun to infiltrate the TEA Party, whom they have effectively labeled as racists. And the naïve TEA Party has accepted them because they oppose CCSS. However, there is a distinct difference between the TEA Party, the WUO, and Occupy Wall Street. The TEA Party values capitalism and our Constitution, while the WUO and Occupy Wall Street espouse the antithesis of these values and believes in Communism with Lenin being their hero. Their stealth in renaming themselves “progressives” has allowed them to infiltrate our institutions of higher learning, and in New York they are attempting to replace all public education hierarchies with like-minded cronies, all the while recruiting teachers as change agents to advance their Commie philosophies. But they are not stopping by infiltrating the field of education; they are making strides in infiltrating the TEA Party, the one entity nationwide that has been fighting to restore constitutional principles, including capitalism.
Make no mistake about it – a Commie is a Commie, is a Commie regardless of any gifts they may appear to be bearing, including opposition to CCSS, which right now happens to suit their means. They are not a friend of capitalism and they are not a supporter of our Constitutional Republic. Should they be successful in co-opting the TEA Party by merging it with Occupy Wall Street, they will be one step closer to achieving their goals and we will be one step closer to forever losing the America we love. What is worse, the TEA Party may unwittingly be aiding this wolf in sheep’s clothing by giving them platforms and allowing their intellect to be admired by TEA Party members. As I’ve said, a Commie is a Commie, is a Commie, and a Trojan horse is still a Trojan horse, even if the Commie and the horse oppose CCSS.
Live webinar on Common Core with Mychal Massie and Roseann Salanitri – Learn More and Register here http://mychal-massie.com/premium/webinar
http://mychal-massie.com/premium/beware-of-commies-bearing-gifts/
There is an old saying that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. While that may be true in some situations, it’s not true in all situations. The fight against Common Core State Standards (CCSS) is a perfect example of why we shouldn’t be so quick to embrace everyone fighting against CCSS as an ally. For instance, The Badass Teachers Association (BAT) is the curious name of a group that may seem like our allies because they are fighting against CCSS, but allies are not always what they seem to be. On their website (http://www.badassteacher.org/) they state:
“This association is for every teacher who refuses to be blamed for the failure of our society to erase poverty and inequality, and refuses to accept assessments, tests and evaluations imposed by those who have contempt for real teaching and learning…”
Make no mistake about it, the BAT may be fighting in this battle but their primary aim is to protect their own jobs and reduce accountability. Their philosophy can be labeled as Stop-the-Test-and-Keep-the-Core, since they do not object to the standards but only the testing. Worse, their underlying focus may be more sinister. The first red flag you may encounter when visiting their site is their symbol, which is distinctively Communist and set against a red background. The next disturbing bit of information jumps out if you visit their “About Us” tab (http://www.badassteacher.org/?page_id=14) and click on the second video. At the end of the video they claim they are “Legion.” For those who are not familiar with the Bible passage where Jesus casts out demons, those demons identify themselves as “Legion.” If these were the only two disconcerting red flags, they would be disconcerting but could be dismissed as alarming coincidences. However, there is more. Before going further, it is necessary to state that not all members of the BAT are as vile as some. There are most likely a large number that have not done the research I have done and aren’t aware of the background of their co-founder and other progressives that they have joined forces with.
The co-founder of BAT is Mark Naison. Naison is no stranger to political activisim. His roots go back to the Weather Underground Organization (WUO) and associates like Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorn. They are anarchists, opportunists, communists, and murders who managed to mentor a young Barack Obama for the White House. While Naison tried to distance himself from the WUO early on out of fear of possible imprisonment, it should be noted that he attended the WUO reunion in 1988. Like many of his counterparts (including Bill Ayers), Naison is a college professor. He is currently teaching at the well-respected Fordham University in New York and is Chair of African and African-American Studies. While his supporting the CCSS-loving Bill de Blassio may seem duplicitous, his background, support of unions, and detest of charter schools tells us that this is a man that may not be what we would like him to be. What is even more disturbing is that TEA Parties right here in New Jersey and the Metro area have invited this man to speak at their meetings – with great accolades of his effectiveness as a speaker. Perhaps someone should remind them that the road to hell is paved with good speakers, ie. Hitler, Mussolini, and of course Barack Obama.
The red flags don’t end with Naison or BAT, there are concerning “coincidences” between Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and the WUO that should not be overlooked. In order to establish these “coincidences”, I will discuss the long-forgotten objectives of the WUO.
The goal of the WUO was to create a revolutionary party to overthrow the “imperial” and capitalistic US government and to create a classless world – translation: Communism. Part of their strategy was to co-opt the anti-Viet Nam war and civil rights movement back in the 1960s. They managed to align themselves with the Black Liberation Movement and labeling those in opposition “racists”, a philosophy that BO’s mentor Jeremiah Wright also embraced. Their underlying plan was to overthrow capitalism by transmitting radical ideas to the working class by involving masses of people. They may have appeared to be anarchists but in actuality, they were/are anti-capitalist – like the 99% of Occupy Wall Street.
John Jacobs, a War Council member of the WUO, stated: “We’re against everything that’s good and decent in honky America…” To a very large degree their goals have been manifested in the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the White House, as well as and labeling their opposition (the TEA party) as racists. The WUO’s view of imperialism was based on Lenin’s “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism” published in 1916, and set forth in their founding document “You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows.” It echoes Lenin’s philosophy that wealth belongs to the oppressed people (the 99%) who are the creators of the wealth of the empire. The WUO goes further by vilifying “white privilege” and creating identity politics. It used the unrest in poor black neighborhoods by infiltrating and injecting them with a victim mentality and vilifying others that they labeled racists.
What is curious is that this anti-capitalist anti-white movement has begun to infiltrate the TEA Party, whom they have effectively labeled as racists. And the naïve TEA Party has accepted them because they oppose CCSS. However, there is a distinct difference between the TEA Party, the WUO, and Occupy Wall Street. The TEA Party values capitalism and our Constitution, while the WUO and Occupy Wall Street espouse the antithesis of these values and believes in Communism with Lenin being their hero. Their stealth in renaming themselves “progressives” has allowed them to infiltrate our institutions of higher learning, and in New York they are attempting to replace all public education hierarchies with like-minded cronies, all the while recruiting teachers as change agents to advance their Commie philosophies. But they are not stopping by infiltrating the field of education; they are making strides in infiltrating the TEA Party, the one entity nationwide that has been fighting to restore constitutional principles, including capitalism.
Make no mistake about it – a Commie is a Commie, is a Commie regardless of any gifts they may appear to be bearing, including opposition to CCSS, which right now happens to suit their means. They are not a friend of capitalism and they are not a supporter of our Constitutional Republic. Should they be successful in co-opting the TEA Party by merging it with Occupy Wall Street, they will be one step closer to achieving their goals and we will be one step closer to forever losing the America we love. What is worse, the TEA Party may unwittingly be aiding this wolf in sheep’s clothing by giving them platforms and allowing their intellect to be admired by TEA Party members. As I’ve said, a Commie is a Commie, is a Commie, and a Trojan horse is still a Trojan horse, even if the Commie and the horse oppose CCSS.
Live webinar on Common Core with Mychal Massie and Roseann Salanitri – Learn More and Register here http://mychal-massie.com/premium/webinar
http://mychal-massie.com/premium/beware-of-commies-bearing-gifts/
From Homeschool.com
It's hard to find trusted homeschooling companies,
but here are a few we think are stellar (in alphabetical order).
but here are a few we think are stellar (in alphabetical order).
Church at Home is a unique website dedicated to providing small, home-based fellowship groups with quality Bible-based materials and resources necessary for a solid Christian foundation. The site features dozens of downloadable articles and over one hundred 30-minute video presentations on various Biblical topics.
Educents is the one and only flash-deal website for educators. Founded by homeschoolers, they believe in access to affordable education for all. Educents negotiates discounted prices with big and small publishers and pass the savings onto you! Save up to 90% on homeschooling curriculum, supplemental products, art supplies, craft kits and more. Check back daily or weekly because their sales only last 7-10 days or until the deal sells out! Save an extra 20% by using code HOMESCHOOL20 at checkout!
eLearningK12 is a personalized, guided, web-based education system for students in Grades K-12. eLearningK12 provides quality, engaging curriculum aligned to state and national standards, as well as assistance from their team of professional educators, if desired. eLearningK12's core values are integrity, respect, and compassion provided in a peaceful and positive environment
Essential Skills Advantage (ESA) online reading programs (ages 4-12) are an affordable and fun supplement to any homeschool curriculum. ESA supports visual, auditory and kinesthetic learning styles with interactive animations and engaging activities. Membership includes full-access to everything ESA has to offer. If you sign-up today, you get your 1st Month FREE!
Hosted in Greenville, South Carolina; Cincinnati, Ohio; and Ontario, California in 2014, as well as expanding to Texas in early 2015, Great Homeschool Conventions offers 100s of workshops and the largest homeschool curriculum exhibit hall available. Outstanding speakers such as Dr. Ben Carson, Heidi St. John, Dr. Jay Wile, Michael Medved, the crazy-popular Matt Walsh, plus dozens of other speakers will be joining Great Homeschool Conventions in 2014. For more information, visit the Great Homeschool Conventions website and join them on Facebook.
Serve Academy is a gap-year mission for graduated high school students. One semester is spent in the inner city, the next on the international mission field. Topics include: life management skills, personal spiritual formation, Christian leadership, and practical missions strategies. Students receive college credit for their studies and a wealth of memories and valuable experiences as they work to make this year matter.
Tapestry of Grace helps parents provide a Christian, classical education using a unit-study approach, with history as the core organizational theme. K-12 students cycle through every four years, with all ages studying the same slice of history each week, each at their own learning level.
The award winning ThinkStretch Summer Learning Program is an at-home review program for Pre-K to 7th grade students with reading, writing, math and science. ThinkStretch engages students and families with fun student activity books, the Parent Guide to Summer, and appreciation medals for every completed workbook. Learn more at www.thinkstretch.com.
Source: http://us7.campaign-archive1.com/?u=e35b3e9c32a5bc32d1125566c&id=49b8aa5f88&e=f7820d4b58
Source: http://us7.campaign-archive1.com/?u=e35b3e9c32a5bc32d1125566c&id=49b8aa5f88&e=f7820d4b58
Common Core: Friend or Foe?
Welcome to Homeschool.com's newsletter, developed specifically to help you with your homeschooling. Please feel free to forward this.
December 19, 2013
Dear Homeschool.com Reader:
There is an ongoing controversy over whether the Common Core is good or bad for teachers, for students, and for parents. There are convincing arguments on both sides. Which side is right? What should you, as a homeschool parent, do?
First of all, let's clarify exactly what we are talking about. Wikipedia states, "The Common Core State Standards Initiative is an education initiative in the United States that details what K-12 students should know in English and math at the end of each grade. The initiative is sponsored by the National Governors Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and seeks to establish consistent education standards across the states as well as ensure that students graduating from high school are prepared to enter two or four year college programs or enter the workforce."
On its face, that seems pretty simple. They want to make sure that students are ready for college or the workforce, and that students who move across state lines will receive comparable education no matter where they live. How the Common Core State Standards Initiative is implemented is where the controversy intensifies.
Education in the United States has always been controlled by parents, either directly or through their elected school board members. In the early days of our country, most children learned at home, either from their parents or from private tutors. Communities sometimes hired a teacher to teach all of the children in a town, in the iconic one room school house. As the Industrial Revolution brought more and more families into the cities to find work, city planners began to offer a free public education to all students in the city. This was the beginning of the modern public school system. As the twentieth century progressed, day to day control of education gradually shifted from the parents to the teachers and other experts in the public school system. Since parents elect the members of the public school board, they remain able to influence its decisions at a local level.
Common Core, however, is a top-down approach to education. Though the standards themselves do not tell teachers exactly how to teach, individual states and school systems often do. For example, the standards indicate that a student should be able to read and comprehend non-fiction text such as a biography, but it does not suggest specific biographies. Curriculum publishers, states, and school systems often make these choices for parents and teachers. This circumvents the parental control which has been a hallmark of education in the United States since its founding. It also prevents teachers from providing the content they feel is best for their students, based on their needs and abilities. Many parents are also concerned about the ability to track a student from school to school and even state to state, monitored by the federal government.
All controversy aside, what does this mean for you as a homeschool parent? If your state is one of the 45 who have fully adopted the English and math standards of the Common Core, it is likely that any state mandated testing will also be based on the Common Core, placing students not exposed to that content at a disadvantage. If your state requires annual testing for homeschool students, research which tests are acceptable, and whether or not they have been updated to reflect the Common Core Standards.
What about your homeschool curriculum? If you purchase books or other curriculum from publishers who also serve school systems, you will likely see changes in the textbooks due to Common Core. You as a parent have the choice to:
- purchase this curriculum and follow the Core
- use the Common Core as a starting point,and supplement as you see fit
- choose curriculum that does not reflect the Common Core
Here at eLearningK12, we believe that high standards are important! We also strongly believe in parental control and customizing curriculum to meet the needs of the students, not the other way around! Parents of our students are free to modify, add to, or eliminate any lesson at any time, based on their personal beliefs and the needs of their children. Parents are given full control over their children's education. Our education consultants are able to offer assistance if needed, but parents are free to choose a level of service that does not include a consultant if desired.
eLearningK12 offers a full complement of curriculum for grades K-12, including language arts, math, science, and social studies. Our primary level science and history courses for grades K-2 are our pride and joy, created exclusively for eLearningK12 students. We offer over 40 high school electives in subjects as varied as veterinary medicine, international business, forensics, early childhood education, archaeology, and more! We bring together the best of web-based learning from a variety of providers, including Compass Learning Odyssey, Discovery Education, Math-U-See, Reading Horizons, Total Reader, eDynamic Courses, and additional providers. Visit eLearningK12.com for more information on courses, prices, and services available for your family today.
Sincerely,
Nancy Toups
Homeschool.com has the following information available free of charge
Podcasts
Free eNewsletter
Homeschooling Tip-of-the-Week
Local Homeschooling Groups
Homeschooling Message Boards
Newsletter Archives
New to homeschooling? Here is some additional information to help you get started.
Welcome!
New to Homeschooling?
Homeschooling Quick Start eKit
Homeschool How-To Recordings
The complete Homeschool.com Directory is below. If we can help you in any way, please contact Advisor@Homeschool.com.
Free Stuff
Free eNewsletter
Homeschooling Tip-of-the-Week
Kid-Safe Browser
Local Homeschooling Groups
Homeschooling Message Boards
Newsletter Archives
Homeschooling Supplies
Curriculum Software Store
Free Homeschooling Resource Guide
Book: Homeschooling For Success
Getting Started
Welcome!
New to Homeschooling?
Homeschooling Quick Start eKit
Self Teaching Manual (eKit)
Homeschool How-To Recordings
Online Courses
We hope you enjoyed receiving this newsletter. If you would like to reprint any of the above information, please contact editor@homeschool.com. If you would rather not receive any future e-newsletters from Homeschool.com, please visit this page: http://www.homeschool.com/us
Homeschool.com, Inc. * 12210 Herdal Drive, Suite 11 * Auburn, CA 95603 * 530.887.1684
December 19, 2013
Dear Homeschool.com Reader:
There is an ongoing controversy over whether the Common Core is good or bad for teachers, for students, and for parents. There are convincing arguments on both sides. Which side is right? What should you, as a homeschool parent, do?
First of all, let's clarify exactly what we are talking about. Wikipedia states, "The Common Core State Standards Initiative is an education initiative in the United States that details what K-12 students should know in English and math at the end of each grade. The initiative is sponsored by the National Governors Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and seeks to establish consistent education standards across the states as well as ensure that students graduating from high school are prepared to enter two or four year college programs or enter the workforce."
On its face, that seems pretty simple. They want to make sure that students are ready for college or the workforce, and that students who move across state lines will receive comparable education no matter where they live. How the Common Core State Standards Initiative is implemented is where the controversy intensifies.
Education in the United States has always been controlled by parents, either directly or through their elected school board members. In the early days of our country, most children learned at home, either from their parents or from private tutors. Communities sometimes hired a teacher to teach all of the children in a town, in the iconic one room school house. As the Industrial Revolution brought more and more families into the cities to find work, city planners began to offer a free public education to all students in the city. This was the beginning of the modern public school system. As the twentieth century progressed, day to day control of education gradually shifted from the parents to the teachers and other experts in the public school system. Since parents elect the members of the public school board, they remain able to influence its decisions at a local level.
Common Core, however, is a top-down approach to education. Though the standards themselves do not tell teachers exactly how to teach, individual states and school systems often do. For example, the standards indicate that a student should be able to read and comprehend non-fiction text such as a biography, but it does not suggest specific biographies. Curriculum publishers, states, and school systems often make these choices for parents and teachers. This circumvents the parental control which has been a hallmark of education in the United States since its founding. It also prevents teachers from providing the content they feel is best for their students, based on their needs and abilities. Many parents are also concerned about the ability to track a student from school to school and even state to state, monitored by the federal government.
All controversy aside, what does this mean for you as a homeschool parent? If your state is one of the 45 who have fully adopted the English and math standards of the Common Core, it is likely that any state mandated testing will also be based on the Common Core, placing students not exposed to that content at a disadvantage. If your state requires annual testing for homeschool students, research which tests are acceptable, and whether or not they have been updated to reflect the Common Core Standards.
What about your homeschool curriculum? If you purchase books or other curriculum from publishers who also serve school systems, you will likely see changes in the textbooks due to Common Core. You as a parent have the choice to:
- purchase this curriculum and follow the Core
- use the Common Core as a starting point,and supplement as you see fit
- choose curriculum that does not reflect the Common Core
Here at eLearningK12, we believe that high standards are important! We also strongly believe in parental control and customizing curriculum to meet the needs of the students, not the other way around! Parents of our students are free to modify, add to, or eliminate any lesson at any time, based on their personal beliefs and the needs of their children. Parents are given full control over their children's education. Our education consultants are able to offer assistance if needed, but parents are free to choose a level of service that does not include a consultant if desired.
eLearningK12 offers a full complement of curriculum for grades K-12, including language arts, math, science, and social studies. Our primary level science and history courses for grades K-2 are our pride and joy, created exclusively for eLearningK12 students. We offer over 40 high school electives in subjects as varied as veterinary medicine, international business, forensics, early childhood education, archaeology, and more! We bring together the best of web-based learning from a variety of providers, including Compass Learning Odyssey, Discovery Education, Math-U-See, Reading Horizons, Total Reader, eDynamic Courses, and additional providers. Visit eLearningK12.com for more information on courses, prices, and services available for your family today.
Sincerely,
Nancy Toups
Homeschool.com has the following information available free of charge
Podcasts
Free eNewsletter
Homeschooling Tip-of-the-Week
Local Homeschooling Groups
Homeschooling Message Boards
Newsletter Archives
New to homeschooling? Here is some additional information to help you get started.
Welcome!
New to Homeschooling?
Homeschooling Quick Start eKit
Homeschool How-To Recordings
The complete Homeschool.com Directory is below. If we can help you in any way, please contact Advisor@Homeschool.com.
Free Stuff
Free eNewsletter
Homeschooling Tip-of-the-Week
Kid-Safe Browser
Local Homeschooling Groups
Homeschooling Message Boards
Newsletter Archives
Homeschooling Supplies
Curriculum Software Store
Free Homeschooling Resource Guide
Book: Homeschooling For Success
Getting Started
Welcome!
New to Homeschooling?
Homeschooling Quick Start eKit
Self Teaching Manual (eKit)
Homeschool How-To Recordings
Online Courses
We hope you enjoyed receiving this newsletter. If you would like to reprint any of the above information, please contact editor@homeschool.com. If you would rather not receive any future e-newsletters from Homeschool.com, please visit this page: http://www.homeschool.com/us
Homeschool.com, Inc. * 12210 Herdal Drive, Suite 11 * Auburn, CA 95603 * 530.887.1684
SCHOOLS NEED HELP - IT IS CALLED FULL FUNDED VOUCHERS TO ANY SCHOOL.
This Common Core math worksheet offers a glimpse into Kafkaesque third-grade hell
The latest nightmarishly awful Common Core math worksheet to bubble up courtesy of Twitter is for third graders, according to Twitchy.
http://twitchy.com/2014/01/27/good-luck-solving-this-3rd-grade-common-core-math-problem/
Here it is, in all its surreal, subtly cruel glory:
The latest nightmarishly awful Common Core math worksheet to bubble up courtesy of Twitter is for third graders, according to Twitchy.
http://twitchy.com/2014/01/27/good-luck-solving-this-3rd-grade-common-core-math-problem/
Here it is, in all its surreal, subtly cruel glory:
Jennifer Hall - My 3rd grader's #CommonCore math homework. Note that there are no shaded parts.
3:12 PM - 27 Jan 2014
The instructions — “Match the picture with the fraction that names the shaded part” — are likely confusing to a typical third-grade kid just trying to make it through the day. This is because, as Twitter user Jennifer Hall keenly notes, there are no shaded parts.
Of course, the instructions would probably be even more confusing to some poor kid who knows very little about fractions.
Sadly, Hall observes, her daughter is just learning fractions for the first time. Below is her FB post:
Jennifer Hall - They just introduced fractions last Thursday in her class.
3:32 PM - 27 Jan 2014
Also, sure enough! Those super-tiny words at the bottom of the worksheet say “Common Core.”
This awful worksheet is the latest in an ever-growing series of stories demonstrating the awfulness of the Common Core State Standards Initiative, a curriculum — but don’t call it a curriculum! — currently being implemented by 45 states and the District of Columbia.
Last week, The Daily Caller brought you a set of incomprehensible directions for nine-year-olds. (RELATED: Here’s another impossibly stupid Common Core math worksheet)
http://dailycaller.com/2014/01/22/heres-another-impossibly-stupid-common-core-math-worksheet/
Read More>>>>>> http://dailycaller.com/2014/01/28/this-common-core-math-worksheet-offers-a-glimpse-into-kafkaesque-third-grade-hell/
3:12 PM - 27 Jan 2014
The instructions — “Match the picture with the fraction that names the shaded part” — are likely confusing to a typical third-grade kid just trying to make it through the day. This is because, as Twitter user Jennifer Hall keenly notes, there are no shaded parts.
Of course, the instructions would probably be even more confusing to some poor kid who knows very little about fractions.
Sadly, Hall observes, her daughter is just learning fractions for the first time. Below is her FB post:
Jennifer Hall - They just introduced fractions last Thursday in her class.
3:32 PM - 27 Jan 2014
Also, sure enough! Those super-tiny words at the bottom of the worksheet say “Common Core.”
This awful worksheet is the latest in an ever-growing series of stories demonstrating the awfulness of the Common Core State Standards Initiative, a curriculum — but don’t call it a curriculum! — currently being implemented by 45 states and the District of Columbia.
Last week, The Daily Caller brought you a set of incomprehensible directions for nine-year-olds. (RELATED: Here’s another impossibly stupid Common Core math worksheet)
http://dailycaller.com/2014/01/22/heres-another-impossibly-stupid-common-core-math-worksheet/
Read More>>>>>> http://dailycaller.com/2014/01/28/this-common-core-math-worksheet-offers-a-glimpse-into-kafkaesque-third-grade-hell/
Mike Huckabee's Take on Common Core
A great video to watch: http://video.foxnews.com/v/2910611477001/huckabee-common-core-is-dead-but-common-sense-shouldnt-be/
Teachers complain Common Core-linked lessons little more than scripts to read
By Perry Chiaramonte
Published December 05, 2013
FoxNews.com
Some of the biggest critics of new lesson plans aligned with the national Common Core standards are the people charged with teaching them.
Published December 05, 2013
FoxNews.com
Some of the biggest critics of new lesson plans aligned with the national Common Core standards are the people charged with teaching them.
|
"It’s like taking something done by humans and having it done by a machine.” - Michael Warren, New Jersey public school teacher |
A growing number of teachers say the national standards, adopted by some 45 states, have combined with pressure to "teach to the test" to take all individuality out of their craft. Some teachers told FoxNews.com the new education approach is turning their lessons into little more than data-dispensing sessions, and they fear their jobs are being marginalized.
“Now teachers aren’t as unique,” said Michael Warren, a public school history teacher in New Jersey. “It means anyone can do it. It’s like taking something done by humans and having it done by a machine.”
Backers of the Common Core Standards Initiative, which was created at the behest of the nation's governors and has since been enthusiastically backed by the Obama administration, say it is critical to ensuring all of the nation's middle and high school students meet a baseline in math and English. But while Common Core is not itself a curriculum, but a set of standardized tests, private curriculum producers are marketing their materials as "Common Core-aligned." Critics of Common Core say establishment of a national standard is simply a backdoor way of nationalizing curriculum.
“The root of the problem with the Common Core initiative is that standards drive testing, which drives curriculum,” Glyn Wright, executive director of The Eagle Forum, a Washington-based watchdog group that has long campaigned against the new curriculum, told FoxNews.com. “The standards were created by private organizations in Washington, D.C., without input from teachers or parents and absent any kind of study or pilot test to prove its effectiveness.”
“In fact, the only mathematician and the only ELA expert on the validation committee refused to sign off on the standards because they are inadequate,” she added, “Yet, the standards have been copyrighted and cannot be changed, and this is resulting in a loss of local and state control.”
Parent groups have criticized Common Core, and there are efforts under way in several states to repeal participation. But the complaints from teachers are relatively new, and come as the Common Core-aligned teaching materials are being implemented for the first time in many districts.
In a recent Washington Post blog post, a Delaware public school educator penned an anonymous letter complaining that Common Core was taking the joy out of a profession she loved.
“Teaching used to be a fun job that I was deeply passionate about," the teacher wrote. "I used my own creativity, mixed with a healthy dose of perseverance, dedication and cheerleading to encourage my students, most labeled ‘special needs,’ to believe in their own abilities and self-worth.”
The teacher goes on to explain that despite strong performance reviews in the past, the Common Core standards have been counter-intuitive to her methods as her employers told her that her performance would be judged to how closely she adheres to the new standard.
"I was given a curriculum and told by my administration to teach it ‘word-for-word,’" the teacher wrote. "In a meeting with my administration, I was reprimanded with “Don’t forget, standards drive our instruction.”
Another New Jersey public school teacher who asked not to be named, said the rigid new instructions for teaching have left her and her colleagues feeling like "robots."
"I'm unable to do projects anymore because we have so much other stuff to do that is based on the Common Core," she told FoxNews.com. "All the teachers at my school, all we talk about is how we don't teach anymore and we feel like robots just doing what we are told to teach and can't have any creativity for the students to enjoy themselves."
Those in favor of the initiative say that many teachers' frustration may be due to an adjustment period as states adapt to Common Core-aligned curriculum.
“The Common Core is a framework,” Otha Thornton, president of the National Parent Teachers Association, told FoxNews.com. "We support local control and it’s up to the state school boards for implementation."
Sharon Necaise, a public school educator at West Feliciana High School, in St. Francisville, La., told FoxNews.com her experience with Common Core has been positive.
"This is the thing, [Common Core] brings a critical thinking and cognitive awareness component that will ensure our students and children are not robots," Nercaise said. "The Commoon Core State Standards are not one size fits all in their approach; students are not only getting the right answer but are articulating why that answer is right. That is why I support these standards…they are not political; they are about good teaching and student learning."
http://fxn.ws/1d1bXKF
“Now teachers aren’t as unique,” said Michael Warren, a public school history teacher in New Jersey. “It means anyone can do it. It’s like taking something done by humans and having it done by a machine.”
Backers of the Common Core Standards Initiative, which was created at the behest of the nation's governors and has since been enthusiastically backed by the Obama administration, say it is critical to ensuring all of the nation's middle and high school students meet a baseline in math and English. But while Common Core is not itself a curriculum, but a set of standardized tests, private curriculum producers are marketing their materials as "Common Core-aligned." Critics of Common Core say establishment of a national standard is simply a backdoor way of nationalizing curriculum.
“The root of the problem with the Common Core initiative is that standards drive testing, which drives curriculum,” Glyn Wright, executive director of The Eagle Forum, a Washington-based watchdog group that has long campaigned against the new curriculum, told FoxNews.com. “The standards were created by private organizations in Washington, D.C., without input from teachers or parents and absent any kind of study or pilot test to prove its effectiveness.”
“In fact, the only mathematician and the only ELA expert on the validation committee refused to sign off on the standards because they are inadequate,” she added, “Yet, the standards have been copyrighted and cannot be changed, and this is resulting in a loss of local and state control.”
Parent groups have criticized Common Core, and there are efforts under way in several states to repeal participation. But the complaints from teachers are relatively new, and come as the Common Core-aligned teaching materials are being implemented for the first time in many districts.
In a recent Washington Post blog post, a Delaware public school educator penned an anonymous letter complaining that Common Core was taking the joy out of a profession she loved.
“Teaching used to be a fun job that I was deeply passionate about," the teacher wrote. "I used my own creativity, mixed with a healthy dose of perseverance, dedication and cheerleading to encourage my students, most labeled ‘special needs,’ to believe in their own abilities and self-worth.”
The teacher goes on to explain that despite strong performance reviews in the past, the Common Core standards have been counter-intuitive to her methods as her employers told her that her performance would be judged to how closely she adheres to the new standard.
"I was given a curriculum and told by my administration to teach it ‘word-for-word,’" the teacher wrote. "In a meeting with my administration, I was reprimanded with “Don’t forget, standards drive our instruction.”
Another New Jersey public school teacher who asked not to be named, said the rigid new instructions for teaching have left her and her colleagues feeling like "robots."
"I'm unable to do projects anymore because we have so much other stuff to do that is based on the Common Core," she told FoxNews.com. "All the teachers at my school, all we talk about is how we don't teach anymore and we feel like robots just doing what we are told to teach and can't have any creativity for the students to enjoy themselves."
Those in favor of the initiative say that many teachers' frustration may be due to an adjustment period as states adapt to Common Core-aligned curriculum.
“The Common Core is a framework,” Otha Thornton, president of the National Parent Teachers Association, told FoxNews.com. "We support local control and it’s up to the state school boards for implementation."
Sharon Necaise, a public school educator at West Feliciana High School, in St. Francisville, La., told FoxNews.com her experience with Common Core has been positive.
"This is the thing, [Common Core] brings a critical thinking and cognitive awareness component that will ensure our students and children are not robots," Nercaise said. "The Commoon Core State Standards are not one size fits all in their approach; students are not only getting the right answer but are articulating why that answer is right. That is why I support these standards…they are not political; they are about good teaching and student learning."
http://fxn.ws/1d1bXKF
This page also has a lot of information about Common Core. http://stopcommoncore.com/
http://www.cato.org/policy-report/novemberdecember-2013/common-core-great-debate
Public School Wars
The policies the two sides fight over are high-stakes indeed. They drive hundreds of billions in public spending. They could impact millions of union jobs and millions in corporate profits. And they will have an enormous impact on where, how and what the next generation learns.
That may be why the hostility seems to be escalating.
http://www.cato.org/blog/flight-not-option-public-school-wars
http://www.cato.org/policy-report/novemberdecember-2013/common-core-great-debate
Public School Wars
The policies the two sides fight over are high-stakes indeed. They drive hundreds of billions in public spending. They could impact millions of union jobs and millions in corporate profits. And they will have an enormous impact on where, how and what the next generation learns.
That may be why the hostility seems to be escalating.
http://www.cato.org/blog/flight-not-option-public-school-wars
High School Student Ethan Young Makes Best Case Ever Against Common Core
by Joshua Cook 11/16/2013
Common Core was passed by governors and bureaucracies with little accountability or democratic oversight, so it is only as the program nears implementation that its many problems have drawn attention. Now, more and more people are speaking out against the program. Students, teachers and parents across the country are voicing their concerns about the program's lowered standards, potential politicization, and unconstitutionality.
Last week, one of the more noteworthy voices of opposition came from a Knox County student named Ethan Young, who spoke at a local School Board meeting. In just over five minutes, Young discussed problems with the creation of the Core, its educational standards, and the harmful constraints the program would place on teachers.
"Somewhere our Founding Fathers are turning in their graves — pleading, screaming and trying to say to us that we teach to free minds. We teach to inspire. We teach to equip, the careers will come naturally" said Young.
Common Core was passed by governors and bureaucracies with little accountability or democratic oversight, so it is only as the program nears implementation that its many problems have drawn attention. Now, more and more people are speaking out against the program. Students, teachers and parents across the country are voicing their concerns about the program's lowered standards, potential politicization, and unconstitutionality.
Last week, one of the more noteworthy voices of opposition came from a Knox County student named Ethan Young, who spoke at a local School Board meeting. In just over five minutes, Young discussed problems with the creation of the Core, its educational standards, and the harmful constraints the program would place on teachers.
"Somewhere our Founding Fathers are turning in their graves — pleading, screaming and trying to say to us that we teach to free minds. We teach to inspire. We teach to equip, the careers will come naturally" said Young.
Though at first glance it would seem the initiative came from states, "in reality it was contrived by an insular group of educational testing executives," a partnership of the National Governors Association, the Council of Chief State School Officers and Achieve Inc, a Gates-funded non-profit. Even the two academic content specialists involved refused to approve the final standards, with one publicly stating that "the standards left students with an empty skill set," Young explained. It was neither created democratically nor by educational specialists.
Young's primary concern, though, came from the national testing requirements. "Much like No Child Left Behind," he quipped, "the program promises national testing and a one size fits all education, because hey, it worked really well the first time." The standards, designed for an industrial education model, treat both students and educators as little more than numbers. Tests don't take into account the interaction at the heart of the teacher student relationship, damage teacher self-esteem, and force teachers to do things which are not beneficial to their students.
"As a student [it's] like watching your teacher jump through flaming hoops to earn a score." Even forgetting all of the ideological problems of common core, treating education as a bureaucratic endeavor rather than a personal one will never work on a practical level. It won't engage students or teach them to love learning. "I mean, why don't we just manufacture robots instead of students? They last longer and they always do what they're told."
Ethan Young's concerns echo those expressed online and at PTA and School Board meetings across the country, from liberal strongholds like New York City to more conservative areas like Utah. Some point to Young's concerns, and some are put off by sexually explicit texts. Others are concerned by data mining, or simply its expense. In fact a growing movement spread via social media would protest Common Core nationwide by declaring November 18 "Don't Send Your Child to School Day."
Common Core's problems range from its creation to its implementation, and cover both ideological and practical issues. The program went largely unnoticed while it was being created and as states were bribed to adopt it, but with the recent wave of scrutiny a number of states have already dropped or attempted to drop the program.
http://freedomoutpost.com/2013/11/high-school-student-ethan-young-makes-best-case-ever-common-core/#lIpC2sB3SU5W1209.99
Young's primary concern, though, came from the national testing requirements. "Much like No Child Left Behind," he quipped, "the program promises national testing and a one size fits all education, because hey, it worked really well the first time." The standards, designed for an industrial education model, treat both students and educators as little more than numbers. Tests don't take into account the interaction at the heart of the teacher student relationship, damage teacher self-esteem, and force teachers to do things which are not beneficial to their students.
"As a student [it's] like watching your teacher jump through flaming hoops to earn a score." Even forgetting all of the ideological problems of common core, treating education as a bureaucratic endeavor rather than a personal one will never work on a practical level. It won't engage students or teach them to love learning. "I mean, why don't we just manufacture robots instead of students? They last longer and they always do what they're told."
Ethan Young's concerns echo those expressed online and at PTA and School Board meetings across the country, from liberal strongholds like New York City to more conservative areas like Utah. Some point to Young's concerns, and some are put off by sexually explicit texts. Others are concerned by data mining, or simply its expense. In fact a growing movement spread via social media would protest Common Core nationwide by declaring November 18 "Don't Send Your Child to School Day."
Common Core's problems range from its creation to its implementation, and cover both ideological and practical issues. The program went largely unnoticed while it was being created and as states were bribed to adopt it, but with the recent wave of scrutiny a number of states have already dropped or attempted to drop the program.
http://freedomoutpost.com/2013/11/high-school-student-ethan-young-makes-best-case-ever-common-core/#lIpC2sB3SU5W1209.99
“Are You a Righty or a Lefty?” Common Core Political Survey for SIXTH GRADERS
There are so many bad things about the Common Core that often times the actual pieces of curriculum that are being used are overlooked.
Right now it is said that teachers and districts can control what they use in the classroom, as long as it aligns with the Common Core and the assessments the children will be taking. When reading the standards themselves, like many of us Common Core fighters have done, you begin to see that the standards lack content and it’s all designed to leave everything open to interpretation. Take math for example; students need to collaborate on the answer and whether or not the answer is correct does not matter so long as they all came to a consensus on the answer they provide.
This carries over into the English Language Arts and we’ve seen the kind of books that the Common Core calls “exemplar.”
Many of us fear that the end goal for the CCSS is to create millions of little blank slates–blank slates that can be easily indoctrinated. Or perhaps subtly indoctrinating them to big government ideology during their education career is their aim. Many people push back on us about that and say that nobody would ever want to do something like that to American children.
Many of us are leery that these types of data mining and data points are aimed at children and parents to be used for nefarious purposes. Because let’s face it, there are bad people in the world and bad people often times seek to hurt others. With the blueprint they are collecting on your life, they could do some very serious, life altering damage. And again, we are met with push back on this idea also. The Pollyanna’s of the world can’t wrap their brain around our “conspiracy theory” ideas.
And then you get slapped in the face with this piece of homework that comes home with your 6th grader.
This politically charged schoolwork seems monumentally appropriate, doesn’t it? Here are the instructions the child is to follow.
According to Stand Up For The Truth! the instructions are followed by just a few of the examples of survey questions under the headings, Guns, Abortion, Crimes & Punishment, Environment, Health Care, Education, Free Speech & Religion, Gay Marriage, Defense, and Taxes.
Right now it is said that teachers and districts can control what they use in the classroom, as long as it aligns with the Common Core and the assessments the children will be taking. When reading the standards themselves, like many of us Common Core fighters have done, you begin to see that the standards lack content and it’s all designed to leave everything open to interpretation. Take math for example; students need to collaborate on the answer and whether or not the answer is correct does not matter so long as they all came to a consensus on the answer they provide.
This carries over into the English Language Arts and we’ve seen the kind of books that the Common Core calls “exemplar.”
Many of us fear that the end goal for the CCSS is to create millions of little blank slates–blank slates that can be easily indoctrinated. Or perhaps subtly indoctrinating them to big government ideology during their education career is their aim. Many people push back on us about that and say that nobody would ever want to do something like that to American children.
Many of us are leery that these types of data mining and data points are aimed at children and parents to be used for nefarious purposes. Because let’s face it, there are bad people in the world and bad people often times seek to hurt others. With the blueprint they are collecting on your life, they could do some very serious, life altering damage. And again, we are met with push back on this idea also. The Pollyanna’s of the world can’t wrap their brain around our “conspiracy theory” ideas.
And then you get slapped in the face with this piece of homework that comes home with your 6th grader.
This politically charged schoolwork seems monumentally appropriate, doesn’t it? Here are the instructions the child is to follow.
According to Stand Up For The Truth! the instructions are followed by just a few of the examples of survey questions under the headings, Guns, Abortion, Crimes & Punishment, Environment, Health Care, Education, Free Speech & Religion, Gay Marriage, Defense, and Taxes.
Kids will then rate themselves on a scale as to where they stand on these issues. I didn’t realize that 12 year olds are versed on these issues, but this assignment assumes they are. Either that or it assumes the directions and beginning explanation of the assignment will muddy up their thinking enough to override any opinions they may hold because of their parents’ own ideology.
The child is then directed to tally up their answers and write a summary describing their position.
And then, as if getting information on a child’s political beliefs aren’t enough, they ask you to have your parents fill out the same form.
And then, as if getting information on a child’s political beliefs aren’t enough, they ask you to have your parents fill out the same form.
I wonder why some of us are afraid the schools will collect political affiliation data on parents?
Not only is this completely inappropriate for a child only 12 years old to be expected to fill out but it’s all personal political opinion and has no place in a school.
As for the parents political beliefs being included in the assignment, what do they intend to use this information for?
Not only is this completely inappropriate for a child only 12 years old to be expected to fill out but it’s all personal political opinion and has no place in a school.
As for the parents political beliefs being included in the assignment, what do they intend to use this information for?
I completely understand a high school government class explaining the differences between political parties like Democrats and Republicans, but just as it is inappropriate for a teacher to stand and preach their particular brand of politics, it’s just as inappropriate, if not more, to ask for not only the child’s point of view but the parents also.
This is why we silly Anti Common Core folks worry about our school system. Once again, taking something that should be learned at home, in the confines of nuclear family, the government wants to take over the rearing of our children.
They will not teach them how to think, but what to think. Politically, spiritually, and socially. Social engineering at its finest.
The great aunt of this student has a head on her shoulders and as you can see, she took it upon herself to set the school district straight.
Here is the complete text of her letter back to the ridiculous teacher who assigned this homework:
This is why we silly Anti Common Core folks worry about our school system. Once again, taking something that should be learned at home, in the confines of nuclear family, the government wants to take over the rearing of our children.
They will not teach them how to think, but what to think. Politically, spiritually, and socially. Social engineering at its finest.
The great aunt of this student has a head on her shoulders and as you can see, she took it upon herself to set the school district straight.
Here is the complete text of her letter back to the ridiculous teacher who assigned this homework:
I am appalled by the “Righty or Lefty” poll. First of all it is nobody’s business what mine or my 12-year-old son’s political views are. Secondly, my own son does not even know what half of these issues mean until after discussing them with him. His answers vary greatly during discussion. His views will always change as he grows and as new issues arise and he learns that these things have an effect on his life.
As I am reading these topics, I have noticed the entire thing is pro-Liberal and con-Conservative, being completely skewed towards “Lefty-nicey/meany conservatives” ideology, which I do not approve of. The entire thing is unbalanced and an unfair and inaccurate representation. My family is NEITHER and I do not appreciate you or the school trying to pawn this assignment off on students who are too young to have valuable opinions on these subjects!
I do not know what importance this has as being an assigned worksheet for a “major grade” (has he has informed me). I do not want to hear about it being for a government assignment! Learning about government is one thing – but it is none of your business to try and pry personal information out of a child on extremely private information. I am excusing my son from this assignment and expect this NOT to be counted against his grade.
Sincerely, _____.
She then goes on to conclude:
If this assignment doesn’t necessarily fit the Common Core agenda, it certainly fits the agenda of those collecting private information on students and parents for the Jeffco School District nearby here in CO by a grant from the Gates Foundation. This assignment is clearly an attempt to collect private data from my niece and her family through her 12 year old son.
The original source of this story is still waiting on confirmation from the school district as to whether or not this is an example of specific Common Core curriculum or a very unwise decision made by a teacher. I’m sure it aligns with the Common Core standards, though. After all, it definitely fits the criteria for “close reading” and “evidence based responses” to what the child discovered.
Read the rest of this PolitiChicks.tv article here: http://politichicks.tv/column/righty-lefty-common-core-political-survey-sixth-graders/#GTauyt6fkmS2yqfh.99
As I am reading these topics, I have noticed the entire thing is pro-Liberal and con-Conservative, being completely skewed towards “Lefty-nicey/meany conservatives” ideology, which I do not approve of. The entire thing is unbalanced and an unfair and inaccurate representation. My family is NEITHER and I do not appreciate you or the school trying to pawn this assignment off on students who are too young to have valuable opinions on these subjects!
I do not know what importance this has as being an assigned worksheet for a “major grade” (has he has informed me). I do not want to hear about it being for a government assignment! Learning about government is one thing – but it is none of your business to try and pry personal information out of a child on extremely private information. I am excusing my son from this assignment and expect this NOT to be counted against his grade.
Sincerely, _____.
She then goes on to conclude:
If this assignment doesn’t necessarily fit the Common Core agenda, it certainly fits the agenda of those collecting private information on students and parents for the Jeffco School District nearby here in CO by a grant from the Gates Foundation. This assignment is clearly an attempt to collect private data from my niece and her family through her 12 year old son.
The original source of this story is still waiting on confirmation from the school district as to whether or not this is an example of specific Common Core curriculum or a very unwise decision made by a teacher. I’m sure it aligns with the Common Core standards, though. After all, it definitely fits the criteria for “close reading” and “evidence based responses” to what the child discovered.
Read the rest of this PolitiChicks.tv article here: http://politichicks.tv/column/righty-lefty-common-core-political-survey-sixth-graders/#GTauyt6fkmS2yqfh.99
About Homeschooling
If You are Interested in Homeschooling!
|
Homeschool.com readers have voted and the following companies have been voted as Top Homeschooling Curriculum for 2013—and right in time for the back to (home) school season!
|
Please take a moment to review the companies listed—after all, they’ve been named the best of the best! We’re sure you’ll see many you’d like to incorporate into your homeschooling efforts this year. There’s something for everyone—music, art, history, math, tutoring, life skills, and much, much, more.
Thank you to all those who participated, and of course, a big congratulations to the companies named the Top Homeschooling Curriculum of 2013!
Click Here to See the Entire List
Thank you to all those who participated, and of course, a big congratulations to the companies named the Top Homeschooling Curriculum of 2013!
Click Here to See the Entire List
An Australian site for Homeschooling: http://www.skwirk.com/my-subjects
Additional Source for Homeschooling: http://homeschool.calvertschool.org/landing/statistics/?utm_source=taboola
For Constitutional education for kids: http://www.constitutionalchampions.org/downloads-links/
http://www.912ppp.com/2013_Camp/Home.html
Additional Source for Homeschooling: http://homeschool.calvertschool.org/landing/statistics/?utm_source=taboola
For Constitutional education for kids: http://www.constitutionalchampions.org/downloads-links/
http://www.912ppp.com/2013_Camp/Home.html
STOP COMMON CORE
COMMON CORE AND EDUCATION!
|
Our Children
© Shelley R. Davis I sit and wonder, where time goes we try our best to teach them right, as times change and our children grow, We love them with all our might. It's not easy to raise a child at times, we don't know what to do we weren't given any instructions It's a challenge that's all new. Our children, are our lives and our most important goal, to love and to guide them and to place them in life's role. Our children are our future and time will only tell the job we've done as parents and if we've done it well.... Source: Raising Children, Children Poem http://www.familyfriendpoems.com/poem/raising-children#ixzz2RrZfxYy0 www.FamilyFriendPoems.com |
Video Series: Why The Common Core Must Be Stopped
Stop Common Core, American Principles Project and the Concerned Women of America in Georgia made the following video series on the Common Core State Standards possible. Our own Jane Robbins gives a broad explanation of the problems of the Common Core.
by Shane Vander Hart on November 16, 2012
|
|
|
|
|
|
See video at right - Parent "arrested" for Protesting Common Core!
|
Below is an article from Hillsdale College's IMPRIMUS publication.
The Case for Good Taste in Children's Books
Meghan Cox Gurdon
Children's Book Reviewer, The Wall Street Journal
The following is adapted from a speech delivered at Hillsdale College on March 12, 2013, sponsored by the College’s Dow Journalism Program.
ON JUNE 4, 2011, the number one trending topic on Twitter was the Anthony Weiner scandal. I happen to remember that, because the number two topic on Twitter that day—almost as frenzied, though a lot less humorous—had to do with an outrageous, intolerable attack on Young Adult literature . . . by me. Entitled “Darkness Too Visible,” my article discussed the increasingly dark current that runs through books classified as YA, for Young Adult—books aimed at readers between 12 and 18 years of age—a subset that has, in the four decades since Young Adult became a distinct category in fiction, become increasingly lurid, grotesque, profane, sexual, and ugly.
Books show us the world, and in that sense, too many books for adolescents act like funhouse mirrors, reflecting hideously distorted portrayals of life. Those of us who have grown up understand that the teen years can be fraught and turbulent—and for some kids, very unhappy—but at the same time we know that in the arc of human life, these years are brief. Today, too many novels for teenagers are long on the turbulence and short on a sense of perspective. Nor does it help that the narrative style that dominates Young Adult books is the first person present tense — “I, I, I,” and “now, now, now.” Writers use this device to create a feeling of urgency, to show solidarity with the reader and to make the reader feel that he or she is occupying the persona of the narrator. The trouble is that the first person present tense also erects a kind of verbal prison, keeping young readers in the turmoil of the moment just as their hormones tend to do. This narrative style reinforces the blinkers teenagers often seem to be wearing, rather than drawing them out and into the open.
Bringing Judgment
The late critic Hilton Kramer was seated once at a dinner next to film director Woody Allen. Allen asked him if he felt embarrassed when he met people socially whom he’d savaged in print. “No,” Kramer said, “they’re the ones who made the bad art. I just described it.” As the story goes, Allen fell gloomily silent, having once made a film that had received the Kramer treatment.
I don’t presume to have a nose as sensitive as Hilton Kramer’s—but I do know that criticism is pointless if it’s only boosterism. To evaluate anything, including children’s books, is to engage the faculty of judgment, which requires that great bugbear of the politically correct, “discrimination.” Thus, in responding to my article, YA book writers Judy Blume and Libba Bray charged that I was giving comfort to book-banners, and Publisher’s Weekly warned of a “danger” that my arguments “encourage a culture of fear around YA literature.” But I do not, in fact, wish to ban any books or frighten any authors. What I do wish is that people in the book business would exercise better taste; that adult authors would not simply validate every spasm of the teen experience; and that our culture was not marching toward ever-greater explicitness in depictions of sex and violence.
Books for children and teenagers are written, packaged, and sold by adults. It follows from this that the emotional depictions they contain come to young people with a kind of adult imprimatur. As a school librarian in Idaho wrote to her colleagues in my defense: “You are naïve if you think young people can read a dark and violent book that sits on the library shelves and not believe that that behavior must be condoned by the adults in their school lives.”
What kind of books are we talking about? Let me give you three examples—but with a warning that some of what you’re about to hear is not appropriate for younger listeners.
A teenaged boy is kidnapped, drugged, and nearly raped by a male captor. After escaping, he comes across a pair of weird glasses that transport him to a world of almost impossible cruelty. Moments later, he finds himself facing a wall of horrors, “covered with impaled heads and other dripping, black-rot body parts: hands, hearts, feet, ears, penises. Where the f— was this?”
That’s from Andrew Smith’s 2010 Young Adult novel, The Marbury Lens.
A girl struggles with self-hatred and self-injury. She cuts herself with razors secretly, but her secret gets out when she’s the victim of a sadistic sexual prank. Kids at school jeer at her, calling her “cutterslut.” In response, “she had sliced her arms to ribbons, but the badness remained, staining her insides like cancer. She had gouged her belly until it was a mess of meat and blood, but she still couldn’t breathe.”
That’s from Jackie Morse Kessler’s 2011 Young Adult novel, Rage.
I won’t read you the most offensive excerpts from my third example, which consist of explicit and obscene descriptions by a 17-year-old female narrator of sexual petting, of oral sex, and of rushing to a bathroom to defecate following a breakup. Yet School Library Journal praised Daria Snadowsky’s 2008 Young Adult novel, Anatomy of a Boyfriend, for dealing “in modern terms with the real issues of discovering sex for the first time.” And Random House, its publisher, gushed about the narrator’s “heartbreakingly honest voice” as she recounts the “exquisite ups and dramatic downs of teenage love and heartbreak.”
The book industry, broadly speaking, says: Kids have a right to read whatever they want. And if you follow the argument through it becomes: Adults should not discriminate between good and bad books or stand as gatekeepers, deciding what young people should read. In other words, the faculty of judgment and taste that we apply in every other area of life involving children should somehow vaporize when it comes in contact with the printed word.
I appeared on National Public Radio to discuss these issues with the Young Adult book author Lauren Myracle, who has been hailed as a person “on the front lines in the fight for freedom of expression”—as if any controversy over whether a book is appropriate for children turns on the question of the author’s freedom to express herself. Myracle made clear that she doesn’t believe there should be any line between adult literature and literature for young people. In saying this, she was echoing the view that prevails in many progressive, secular circles—that young people should encounter material that jolts them out of their comfort zone; that the world is a tough place; and that there’s no point shielding children from reality. I took the less progressive, less secular view that parents should take a more interventionist approach, steering their children away from books about sex and horror and degradation, and towards books that make aesthetic and moral claims.
Now, although it may seem that our culture is split between Left and Right on the question of permissiveness regarding children’s reading material, in fact there is not so much division on the core issue as might appear. Secular progressives, despite their reaction to my article, have their own list of books they think young people shouldn’t read—for instance, books they claim are tinged with racism or jingoism or that depict traditional gender roles. Regarding the latter, you would not believe the extent to which children’s picture books today go out of the way to show father in an apron and mother tinkering with machinery. It’s pretty funny. But my larger point here is that the self-proclaimed anti-book-banners on the Left agree that books influence children and prefer some books to others.
Indeed, in the early years of the Cold War, many left-wing creative people in America gravitated toward children’s literature. Philip Nel, a professor at Kansas State University, has written that Red-hunters, “seeing children’s books as a field dominated by women . . . deemed it less important and so did not watch it closely.” Among the authors I am referring to are Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss) and Ruth Krauss, author of the 1952 classic A Hole is to Dig, illustrated by a young Maurice Sendak. Krauss was quite open in her belief that children’s literature was an excellent means of putting left-wing ideas into young minds. Or so she hoped.
When I was a little girl I read The Cat in the Hat, and I took from it an understanding of the sanctity of private property—it outraged me when the Cat and Thing One and Thing Two rampaged through the children’s house while their mother was away. Dr. Seuss was probably not intending to inculcate capitalist ideas—quite the contrary. But it happened in my case, and the point is instructive.
Taste and Beauty
A recent study conducted at Virginia Tech found that college women who read “chick lit”—light novels that deal with the angst of being a modern woman—reported feeling more insecure about themselves and their bodies after reading novels in which the heroines feel insecure about themselves and their bodies. Similarly, federal researchers were puzzled for years by a seeming paradox when it came to educating children about the dangers of drugs and tobacco. There seemed to be a correlation between anti-drug and anti-tobacco programs in elementary and middle schools and subsequent drug and tobacco use at those schools. It turned out that at the same time children were learning that drugs and tobacco were bad, they were taking in the meta-message that adults expected them to use drugs and tobacco.
This is why good taste matters so much when it comes to books for children and young adults. Books tell children what to expect, what life is, what culture is, how we are expected to behave—what the spectrum is. Books don’t just cater to tastes. They form tastes. They create norms—and as the examples above show, the norms young people take away are not necessarily the norms adults intend. This is why I am skeptical of the social utility of so-called “problem novels”—books that have a troubled main character, such as a girl with a father who started raping her when she was a toddler and anonymously provides her with knives when she is a teenager hoping that she will cut herself to death. (This scenario is from Cheryl Rainfield’s 2010 Young Adult novel, Scars, which School Library Journal hailed as “one heck of a good book.”) The argument in favor of such books is that they validate the real and terrible experiences of teenagers who have been abused, addicted, or raped—among other things. The problem is that the very act of detailing these pathologies, not just in one book but in many, normalizes them. And teenagers are all about identifying norms and adhering to them.
In journalist Emily Bazelon’s recent book about bullying, she describes how schools are using a method called “social norming” to discourage drinking and driving. “The idea,” she writes, “is that students often overestimate how much other kids drink and drive, and when they find out that it’s less prevalent than they think—outlier behavior rather than the norm—they’re less likely to do it themselves.” The same goes for bullying: “When kids understand that cruelty isn’t the norm,” Bazelon says, “they’re less likely to be cruel themselves.”
Now isn’t that interesting?
Ok, you say, but books for kids have always been dark. What about Hansel and Gretel? What about the scene in Beowulf where the monster sneaks into the Danish camp and starts eating people?
Beowulf is admittedly gruesome in parts—and fairy tales are often scary. Yet we approach them at a kind of arm’s length, almost as allegory. In the case of Beowulf, furthermore, children reading it—or having it read to them—are absorbing the rhythms of one of mankind’s great heroic epics, one that explicitly reminds us that our talents come from God and that we act under God’s eye and guidance. Even with the gore, Beowulf won’t make a child callous. It will help to civilize him.
English philosopher Roger Scruton has written at length about what he calls the modern “flight from beauty,” which he sees in every aspect of our contemporary culture. “It is not merely,” he writes, “that artists, directors, musicians and others connected with the arts”—here we might include authors of Young Adult literature—“are in a flight from beauty . . . . There is a desire to spoil beauty . . . . For beauty makes a claim on us; it is a call to renounce our narcisissm and look with reverence on the world.”
We can go to the Palazzo Borghese in Rome and stand before Caravaggio’s painting of David with the head of Goliath, and though we are looking at horror we are not seeing ugliness. The light that plays across David’s face and chest, and that slants across Goliath’s half-open eyes and mouth, transforms the scene into something beautiful. The problem with the darker offerings in Young Adult literature is that they lack this transforming and uplifting quality. They take difficult subjects and wallow in them in a gluttonous way; they show an orgiastic lack of restraint that is the mark of bad taste.
Young Adult book author Sherman Alexie wrote a rebuttal to my article entitled, “Why the Best Kids Books are Written in Blood.” In it, he asks how I could honestly believe that a sexually explicit Young Adult novel might traumatize a teenaged mother. “Does she believe that a YA novel about murder and rape will somehow shock a teenager whose life has been damaged by murder and rape? Does she believe a dystopian novel will frighten a kid who already lives in hell?”
Well of course I don’t. But I also don’t believe that the vast majority of 12-to-18-year-olds are living in hell. And as for those who are, does it really serve them to give them more torment and sulphur in the stories they read?
The body of children’s literature is a little like the Library of Babel in the Jorge Luis Borges story—shelf after shelf of books, many almost gibberish, but a rare few filled with wisdom and beauty and answers to important questions. These are the books that have lasted because generation after generation has seen in them something transcendent, and has passed them on. Maria Tatar, who teaches children’s literature at Harvard, describes books like The Chronicles of Narnia, The Wind in the Willows, The Jungle Books, and Pinocchio as “setting minds into motion, renewing senses, and almost rewiring brains.”
Or as William Wordsworth wrote: “What we have loved/others will love, and we will teach them how.”
* * *The good news is that just like the lousy books of the past, the lousy books of the present will blow away like chaff. The bad news is that they will leave their mark. As in so many aspects of culture, the damage they do can’t easily be measured. It is more a thing to be felt—a coarseness, an emptiness, a sorrow.
“Beauty is vanishing from our world because we live as if it does not matter.” That’s Roger Scruton again. But he doesn’t want us to despair. He also writes:
It is one mark of rational beings that they do not live only—or even at all—in the present. They have the freedom to despise the world that surrounds them and live another way. The art, literature, and music of our civilization remind them of this, and also point to the path that lies always before them: the path out of desecration towards the sacred and the sacrificial.
Let me close with Saint Paul the Apostle in Philippians 4:8:
Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.
And let us think about these words when we go shopping for books for our children.
Children's Book Reviewer, The Wall Street Journal
The following is adapted from a speech delivered at Hillsdale College on March 12, 2013, sponsored by the College’s Dow Journalism Program.
ON JUNE 4, 2011, the number one trending topic on Twitter was the Anthony Weiner scandal. I happen to remember that, because the number two topic on Twitter that day—almost as frenzied, though a lot less humorous—had to do with an outrageous, intolerable attack on Young Adult literature . . . by me. Entitled “Darkness Too Visible,” my article discussed the increasingly dark current that runs through books classified as YA, for Young Adult—books aimed at readers between 12 and 18 years of age—a subset that has, in the four decades since Young Adult became a distinct category in fiction, become increasingly lurid, grotesque, profane, sexual, and ugly.
Books show us the world, and in that sense, too many books for adolescents act like funhouse mirrors, reflecting hideously distorted portrayals of life. Those of us who have grown up understand that the teen years can be fraught and turbulent—and for some kids, very unhappy—but at the same time we know that in the arc of human life, these years are brief. Today, too many novels for teenagers are long on the turbulence and short on a sense of perspective. Nor does it help that the narrative style that dominates Young Adult books is the first person present tense — “I, I, I,” and “now, now, now.” Writers use this device to create a feeling of urgency, to show solidarity with the reader and to make the reader feel that he or she is occupying the persona of the narrator. The trouble is that the first person present tense also erects a kind of verbal prison, keeping young readers in the turmoil of the moment just as their hormones tend to do. This narrative style reinforces the blinkers teenagers often seem to be wearing, rather than drawing them out and into the open.
Bringing Judgment
The late critic Hilton Kramer was seated once at a dinner next to film director Woody Allen. Allen asked him if he felt embarrassed when he met people socially whom he’d savaged in print. “No,” Kramer said, “they’re the ones who made the bad art. I just described it.” As the story goes, Allen fell gloomily silent, having once made a film that had received the Kramer treatment.
I don’t presume to have a nose as sensitive as Hilton Kramer’s—but I do know that criticism is pointless if it’s only boosterism. To evaluate anything, including children’s books, is to engage the faculty of judgment, which requires that great bugbear of the politically correct, “discrimination.” Thus, in responding to my article, YA book writers Judy Blume and Libba Bray charged that I was giving comfort to book-banners, and Publisher’s Weekly warned of a “danger” that my arguments “encourage a culture of fear around YA literature.” But I do not, in fact, wish to ban any books or frighten any authors. What I do wish is that people in the book business would exercise better taste; that adult authors would not simply validate every spasm of the teen experience; and that our culture was not marching toward ever-greater explicitness in depictions of sex and violence.
Books for children and teenagers are written, packaged, and sold by adults. It follows from this that the emotional depictions they contain come to young people with a kind of adult imprimatur. As a school librarian in Idaho wrote to her colleagues in my defense: “You are naïve if you think young people can read a dark and violent book that sits on the library shelves and not believe that that behavior must be condoned by the adults in their school lives.”
What kind of books are we talking about? Let me give you three examples—but with a warning that some of what you’re about to hear is not appropriate for younger listeners.
A teenaged boy is kidnapped, drugged, and nearly raped by a male captor. After escaping, he comes across a pair of weird glasses that transport him to a world of almost impossible cruelty. Moments later, he finds himself facing a wall of horrors, “covered with impaled heads and other dripping, black-rot body parts: hands, hearts, feet, ears, penises. Where the f— was this?”
That’s from Andrew Smith’s 2010 Young Adult novel, The Marbury Lens.
A girl struggles with self-hatred and self-injury. She cuts herself with razors secretly, but her secret gets out when she’s the victim of a sadistic sexual prank. Kids at school jeer at her, calling her “cutterslut.” In response, “she had sliced her arms to ribbons, but the badness remained, staining her insides like cancer. She had gouged her belly until it was a mess of meat and blood, but she still couldn’t breathe.”
That’s from Jackie Morse Kessler’s 2011 Young Adult novel, Rage.
I won’t read you the most offensive excerpts from my third example, which consist of explicit and obscene descriptions by a 17-year-old female narrator of sexual petting, of oral sex, and of rushing to a bathroom to defecate following a breakup. Yet School Library Journal praised Daria Snadowsky’s 2008 Young Adult novel, Anatomy of a Boyfriend, for dealing “in modern terms with the real issues of discovering sex for the first time.” And Random House, its publisher, gushed about the narrator’s “heartbreakingly honest voice” as she recounts the “exquisite ups and dramatic downs of teenage love and heartbreak.”
The book industry, broadly speaking, says: Kids have a right to read whatever they want. And if you follow the argument through it becomes: Adults should not discriminate between good and bad books or stand as gatekeepers, deciding what young people should read. In other words, the faculty of judgment and taste that we apply in every other area of life involving children should somehow vaporize when it comes in contact with the printed word.
I appeared on National Public Radio to discuss these issues with the Young Adult book author Lauren Myracle, who has been hailed as a person “on the front lines in the fight for freedom of expression”—as if any controversy over whether a book is appropriate for children turns on the question of the author’s freedom to express herself. Myracle made clear that she doesn’t believe there should be any line between adult literature and literature for young people. In saying this, she was echoing the view that prevails in many progressive, secular circles—that young people should encounter material that jolts them out of their comfort zone; that the world is a tough place; and that there’s no point shielding children from reality. I took the less progressive, less secular view that parents should take a more interventionist approach, steering their children away from books about sex and horror and degradation, and towards books that make aesthetic and moral claims.
Now, although it may seem that our culture is split between Left and Right on the question of permissiveness regarding children’s reading material, in fact there is not so much division on the core issue as might appear. Secular progressives, despite their reaction to my article, have their own list of books they think young people shouldn’t read—for instance, books they claim are tinged with racism or jingoism or that depict traditional gender roles. Regarding the latter, you would not believe the extent to which children’s picture books today go out of the way to show father in an apron and mother tinkering with machinery. It’s pretty funny. But my larger point here is that the self-proclaimed anti-book-banners on the Left agree that books influence children and prefer some books to others.
Indeed, in the early years of the Cold War, many left-wing creative people in America gravitated toward children’s literature. Philip Nel, a professor at Kansas State University, has written that Red-hunters, “seeing children’s books as a field dominated by women . . . deemed it less important and so did not watch it closely.” Among the authors I am referring to are Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss) and Ruth Krauss, author of the 1952 classic A Hole is to Dig, illustrated by a young Maurice Sendak. Krauss was quite open in her belief that children’s literature was an excellent means of putting left-wing ideas into young minds. Or so she hoped.
When I was a little girl I read The Cat in the Hat, and I took from it an understanding of the sanctity of private property—it outraged me when the Cat and Thing One and Thing Two rampaged through the children’s house while their mother was away. Dr. Seuss was probably not intending to inculcate capitalist ideas—quite the contrary. But it happened in my case, and the point is instructive.
Taste and Beauty
A recent study conducted at Virginia Tech found that college women who read “chick lit”—light novels that deal with the angst of being a modern woman—reported feeling more insecure about themselves and their bodies after reading novels in which the heroines feel insecure about themselves and their bodies. Similarly, federal researchers were puzzled for years by a seeming paradox when it came to educating children about the dangers of drugs and tobacco. There seemed to be a correlation between anti-drug and anti-tobacco programs in elementary and middle schools and subsequent drug and tobacco use at those schools. It turned out that at the same time children were learning that drugs and tobacco were bad, they were taking in the meta-message that adults expected them to use drugs and tobacco.
This is why good taste matters so much when it comes to books for children and young adults. Books tell children what to expect, what life is, what culture is, how we are expected to behave—what the spectrum is. Books don’t just cater to tastes. They form tastes. They create norms—and as the examples above show, the norms young people take away are not necessarily the norms adults intend. This is why I am skeptical of the social utility of so-called “problem novels”—books that have a troubled main character, such as a girl with a father who started raping her when she was a toddler and anonymously provides her with knives when she is a teenager hoping that she will cut herself to death. (This scenario is from Cheryl Rainfield’s 2010 Young Adult novel, Scars, which School Library Journal hailed as “one heck of a good book.”) The argument in favor of such books is that they validate the real and terrible experiences of teenagers who have been abused, addicted, or raped—among other things. The problem is that the very act of detailing these pathologies, not just in one book but in many, normalizes them. And teenagers are all about identifying norms and adhering to them.
In journalist Emily Bazelon’s recent book about bullying, she describes how schools are using a method called “social norming” to discourage drinking and driving. “The idea,” she writes, “is that students often overestimate how much other kids drink and drive, and when they find out that it’s less prevalent than they think—outlier behavior rather than the norm—they’re less likely to do it themselves.” The same goes for bullying: “When kids understand that cruelty isn’t the norm,” Bazelon says, “they’re less likely to be cruel themselves.”
Now isn’t that interesting?
Ok, you say, but books for kids have always been dark. What about Hansel and Gretel? What about the scene in Beowulf where the monster sneaks into the Danish camp and starts eating people?
Beowulf is admittedly gruesome in parts—and fairy tales are often scary. Yet we approach them at a kind of arm’s length, almost as allegory. In the case of Beowulf, furthermore, children reading it—or having it read to them—are absorbing the rhythms of one of mankind’s great heroic epics, one that explicitly reminds us that our talents come from God and that we act under God’s eye and guidance. Even with the gore, Beowulf won’t make a child callous. It will help to civilize him.
English philosopher Roger Scruton has written at length about what he calls the modern “flight from beauty,” which he sees in every aspect of our contemporary culture. “It is not merely,” he writes, “that artists, directors, musicians and others connected with the arts”—here we might include authors of Young Adult literature—“are in a flight from beauty . . . . There is a desire to spoil beauty . . . . For beauty makes a claim on us; it is a call to renounce our narcisissm and look with reverence on the world.”
We can go to the Palazzo Borghese in Rome and stand before Caravaggio’s painting of David with the head of Goliath, and though we are looking at horror we are not seeing ugliness. The light that plays across David’s face and chest, and that slants across Goliath’s half-open eyes and mouth, transforms the scene into something beautiful. The problem with the darker offerings in Young Adult literature is that they lack this transforming and uplifting quality. They take difficult subjects and wallow in them in a gluttonous way; they show an orgiastic lack of restraint that is the mark of bad taste.
Young Adult book author Sherman Alexie wrote a rebuttal to my article entitled, “Why the Best Kids Books are Written in Blood.” In it, he asks how I could honestly believe that a sexually explicit Young Adult novel might traumatize a teenaged mother. “Does she believe that a YA novel about murder and rape will somehow shock a teenager whose life has been damaged by murder and rape? Does she believe a dystopian novel will frighten a kid who already lives in hell?”
Well of course I don’t. But I also don’t believe that the vast majority of 12-to-18-year-olds are living in hell. And as for those who are, does it really serve them to give them more torment and sulphur in the stories they read?
The body of children’s literature is a little like the Library of Babel in the Jorge Luis Borges story—shelf after shelf of books, many almost gibberish, but a rare few filled with wisdom and beauty and answers to important questions. These are the books that have lasted because generation after generation has seen in them something transcendent, and has passed them on. Maria Tatar, who teaches children’s literature at Harvard, describes books like The Chronicles of Narnia, The Wind in the Willows, The Jungle Books, and Pinocchio as “setting minds into motion, renewing senses, and almost rewiring brains.”
Or as William Wordsworth wrote: “What we have loved/others will love, and we will teach them how.”
* * *The good news is that just like the lousy books of the past, the lousy books of the present will blow away like chaff. The bad news is that they will leave their mark. As in so many aspects of culture, the damage they do can’t easily be measured. It is more a thing to be felt—a coarseness, an emptiness, a sorrow.
“Beauty is vanishing from our world because we live as if it does not matter.” That’s Roger Scruton again. But he doesn’t want us to despair. He also writes:
It is one mark of rational beings that they do not live only—or even at all—in the present. They have the freedom to despise the world that surrounds them and live another way. The art, literature, and music of our civilization remind them of this, and also point to the path that lies always before them: the path out of desecration towards the sacred and the sacrificial.
Let me close with Saint Paul the Apostle in Philippians 4:8:
Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.
And let us think about these words when we go shopping for books for our children.
Common Core critics warn of fuzzy math and less fiction
By Perry Chiaramonte
Published September 04, 2013
If the new national Common Core educational standards influence curriculum the way some fear they will, students can say goodbye to literary classics and hello to fuzzy math, say critics.
The Common Core State Standards initiative, a plan devised by the nation's governors and backed by the Obama administration, seeks to set a uniform standard for grades K-12, to ensure kids all over the nation reach the same minimum level of learning. Some 45 states, in many cases enticed by federal grants, have signed on and testing of students in grades 3-8 and once in high school is scheduled to begin next year.
Supporters say Common Core only tests students in math and English, but critics say school districts will devise curriculum to maximize their students' performance on the national exams, and, in fact, have already begun that measure. And those same critics claim Common Core math standards barely cover basic geometry or second-year algebra and that the classics are all but ignored in English classes.
“The math standard focuses on investigative math, which has been shown to be a disaster,” Glyn Wright, executive director of Eagle Forum, told FoxNews.com. “With the new math standard in the Common Core, there are no longer absolute truths. So 3 times 4 can now equal 11 so long as a student can effectively explain how they reached that answer.”
Stanford Prof. James Milgram, the only mathematician on the Common Core Validation Committee, refused to sign off on the math standards, calling the whole thing “in large measure a political document” during testimony he gave in May 2011 in which he advocated for Texas not to adopt the Common Core standards.
“I had considerable influence on the mathematics standards in the document. However, as is often the case, there was input from many other sources -- including State Departments of Education -- that had to be incorporated into the standards,” he said during the testimony.
“So three times four can now equal 11 so long as a student can effectively explain how they reached that answer.”
- Glyn Wright, Eagle Forum
“A number of these sources were mainly focused on things like making the standards as non-challenging as possible. Others were focused on making sure their favorite topics were present, and handled in the way they liked,” he also said, adding that it led to a number of “extremely serious failings” in the Common Core that made it premature for any state hoping to improve math scores to implement them and that the Core Math standards were designed to reflect very low expectations.
But an official for the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, which backs Common Core, says the new standards have the opposite effect and can actually encourage critical thinking in students. She denied that the standards allow for wrong answers, but said the emphasis is on the process.
“One of the things we learned from research, and there’s a lot of it out there, is that kids do not necessarily learn from the algorithmic method,” Linda Gojak, president of the NCTM said to FoxNews.com. “The assessment is that it is more about kids making sense of what they are learning instead of memorizing a step-by-step process.”
But Wright believes critical thinking could actually be a casualty of Common Core.
“We think the goal of education is to make individual thinkers of our children,” she said. “The Common Core does the opposite. The [literacy] standard severely de-emphasizes classic literature which will surely lower critical thinking.”
Timothy Shanahan, a professor at the University of Illinois who also was part of an independent expert panel that reviewed the standards, speculates why many are opposed to Common Core.
“The reason that this criticism is coming up is because the Common Core is promoting greater attention to science, history and other informational texts,” he said to FoxNews.com. “Studies show that American kids do better with stories than with science or history materials, placing them at a real disadvantage in international economic competition.”
Because the actual Common Core exams have not yet been formulated, there is no list of what literature students may or may not be tested on. But critics say the stated policy of emphasizing "informational," or non-fiction reading, in English will inevitably come at the expense of literature classics. Those time-tested books are not simply fun to read, according to Brigham Young University English Prof. Alan Manning, they teach students how to write.
"An argument can be made that any improvement in reading/writing instruction should include more rather than fewer exercises where students write stories themselves that are modeled on the classics," Manning wrote in an e-mail to Utah activists opposed to Common Core. "This creates a more stable foundation on which students can build skills for other kinds of writing. The Core standards would prevent public schools from testing these kinds of approaches."
But Shanahan rejects the premise that more non-fiction will mean less fiction.
“Common core doesn't downgrade literature in our schools, but it does push for a big increase in those other kinds of reading,” he added.
While Common Core has plenty of defenders -- and may prove beneficial -- the main criticism is that it is not the federal government's job to impose educational standards, say critics. Finding out what works is the job of local districts, working with parents, they say.
“The bottom line is that the Common Core Initiative is nationalized education -- to which we are starkly opposed,” Wright also said. “Formerly, parents would have control over what their children are being taught in the classroom, but under Common Core everything comes down from a central, national group. Because the tests and standards are copyright and must be used as-is, parents will not be able to control the material on which their children are taught and tested.”
Groups that support Common Core disagree.
“Just because you have state standards, doesn’t mean a district will have a standardized curriculum,” Chad Colby, a spokesman for education non-profit Achieve, told FoxNews.com.
“Many states already have standards in place and curriculum varies district to district and even school to school,” he added, referring to the state standards in Arkansas which have been in place for 20 years but allows every school to independently choose their curriculum.
“The common core doesn’t tell you how to teach students," Colby said. "The curriculum will still be at the state level.”
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/08/30/new-age-education-fuzzy-math-and-less-fiction/#ixzz2e2gfqBwB
Published September 04, 2013
If the new national Common Core educational standards influence curriculum the way some fear they will, students can say goodbye to literary classics and hello to fuzzy math, say critics.
The Common Core State Standards initiative, a plan devised by the nation's governors and backed by the Obama administration, seeks to set a uniform standard for grades K-12, to ensure kids all over the nation reach the same minimum level of learning. Some 45 states, in many cases enticed by federal grants, have signed on and testing of students in grades 3-8 and once in high school is scheduled to begin next year.
Supporters say Common Core only tests students in math and English, but critics say school districts will devise curriculum to maximize their students' performance on the national exams, and, in fact, have already begun that measure. And those same critics claim Common Core math standards barely cover basic geometry or second-year algebra and that the classics are all but ignored in English classes.
“The math standard focuses on investigative math, which has been shown to be a disaster,” Glyn Wright, executive director of Eagle Forum, told FoxNews.com. “With the new math standard in the Common Core, there are no longer absolute truths. So 3 times 4 can now equal 11 so long as a student can effectively explain how they reached that answer.”
Stanford Prof. James Milgram, the only mathematician on the Common Core Validation Committee, refused to sign off on the math standards, calling the whole thing “in large measure a political document” during testimony he gave in May 2011 in which he advocated for Texas not to adopt the Common Core standards.
“I had considerable influence on the mathematics standards in the document. However, as is often the case, there was input from many other sources -- including State Departments of Education -- that had to be incorporated into the standards,” he said during the testimony.
“So three times four can now equal 11 so long as a student can effectively explain how they reached that answer.”
- Glyn Wright, Eagle Forum
“A number of these sources were mainly focused on things like making the standards as non-challenging as possible. Others were focused on making sure their favorite topics were present, and handled in the way they liked,” he also said, adding that it led to a number of “extremely serious failings” in the Common Core that made it premature for any state hoping to improve math scores to implement them and that the Core Math standards were designed to reflect very low expectations.
But an official for the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, which backs Common Core, says the new standards have the opposite effect and can actually encourage critical thinking in students. She denied that the standards allow for wrong answers, but said the emphasis is on the process.
“One of the things we learned from research, and there’s a lot of it out there, is that kids do not necessarily learn from the algorithmic method,” Linda Gojak, president of the NCTM said to FoxNews.com. “The assessment is that it is more about kids making sense of what they are learning instead of memorizing a step-by-step process.”
But Wright believes critical thinking could actually be a casualty of Common Core.
“We think the goal of education is to make individual thinkers of our children,” she said. “The Common Core does the opposite. The [literacy] standard severely de-emphasizes classic literature which will surely lower critical thinking.”
Timothy Shanahan, a professor at the University of Illinois who also was part of an independent expert panel that reviewed the standards, speculates why many are opposed to Common Core.
“The reason that this criticism is coming up is because the Common Core is promoting greater attention to science, history and other informational texts,” he said to FoxNews.com. “Studies show that American kids do better with stories than with science or history materials, placing them at a real disadvantage in international economic competition.”
Because the actual Common Core exams have not yet been formulated, there is no list of what literature students may or may not be tested on. But critics say the stated policy of emphasizing "informational," or non-fiction reading, in English will inevitably come at the expense of literature classics. Those time-tested books are not simply fun to read, according to Brigham Young University English Prof. Alan Manning, they teach students how to write.
"An argument can be made that any improvement in reading/writing instruction should include more rather than fewer exercises where students write stories themselves that are modeled on the classics," Manning wrote in an e-mail to Utah activists opposed to Common Core. "This creates a more stable foundation on which students can build skills for other kinds of writing. The Core standards would prevent public schools from testing these kinds of approaches."
But Shanahan rejects the premise that more non-fiction will mean less fiction.
“Common core doesn't downgrade literature in our schools, but it does push for a big increase in those other kinds of reading,” he added.
While Common Core has plenty of defenders -- and may prove beneficial -- the main criticism is that it is not the federal government's job to impose educational standards, say critics. Finding out what works is the job of local districts, working with parents, they say.
“The bottom line is that the Common Core Initiative is nationalized education -- to which we are starkly opposed,” Wright also said. “Formerly, parents would have control over what their children are being taught in the classroom, but under Common Core everything comes down from a central, national group. Because the tests and standards are copyright and must be used as-is, parents will not be able to control the material on which their children are taught and tested.”
Groups that support Common Core disagree.
“Just because you have state standards, doesn’t mean a district will have a standardized curriculum,” Chad Colby, a spokesman for education non-profit Achieve, told FoxNews.com.
“Many states already have standards in place and curriculum varies district to district and even school to school,” he added, referring to the state standards in Arkansas which have been in place for 20 years but allows every school to independently choose their curriculum.
“The common core doesn’t tell you how to teach students," Colby said. "The curriculum will still be at the state level.”
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/08/30/new-age-education-fuzzy-math-and-less-fiction/#ixzz2e2gfqBwB
Common Core Brings Chaos - Not Accountability - To The Classroom
Classroom chaos? Critics blast new Common Core education standards
Published September 04, 2013
A full year before students around the nation submit to the new Common Core standardized tests, the federally-backed program is already causing chaos and confusion at local school board meetings, in the classroom and at the dinner table.
As critics fear Washington is poised to take control of what and how local districts teach kids, school administrators are adopting new curriculum in an effort to ensure their students outperform their peers and parents worry that their children are being used as academic guinea pigs. As the program gets closer to full implementation, a full-blown backlash is developing despite assurances from supporters that it is merely a test aimed at establishing a national standard.
“Common Core is forcing districts to re-think math curriculum. And in cases like ours, they are making poor decisions.”
- Kelly Crisp, parent from Fairfield, Conn.
“It’s just now reaching their school districts and their children’s schools and they want to know, ‘What is this, and why is it being forced on us?’” said the Cato Institute’s Neil McCluskey.
When 90 percent of states signed on to subject K-12 students to the Common Core math and English standards being pushed by the federal government, the program looked like an unqualified success. Kids around the nation would be tested once a year in grades 3-8 in math and English language arts, and once in high school, either in the 10th or 11th grades. Finally, students throughout the country could be measured by the same yardstick, long before taking college entrance exams. Local districts that excelled at educating children could be singled out, and ones who lagged could also be identified in order to address problems.
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/09/04/critics-claim-common-core-brings-chaos-not-accountability-to-classroom/
Published September 04, 2013
A full year before students around the nation submit to the new Common Core standardized tests, the federally-backed program is already causing chaos and confusion at local school board meetings, in the classroom and at the dinner table.
As critics fear Washington is poised to take control of what and how local districts teach kids, school administrators are adopting new curriculum in an effort to ensure their students outperform their peers and parents worry that their children are being used as academic guinea pigs. As the program gets closer to full implementation, a full-blown backlash is developing despite assurances from supporters that it is merely a test aimed at establishing a national standard.
“Common Core is forcing districts to re-think math curriculum. And in cases like ours, they are making poor decisions.”
- Kelly Crisp, parent from Fairfield, Conn.
“It’s just now reaching their school districts and their children’s schools and they want to know, ‘What is this, and why is it being forced on us?’” said the Cato Institute’s Neil McCluskey.
When 90 percent of states signed on to subject K-12 students to the Common Core math and English standards being pushed by the federal government, the program looked like an unqualified success. Kids around the nation would be tested once a year in grades 3-8 in math and English language arts, and once in high school, either in the 10th or 11th grades. Finally, students throughout the country could be measured by the same yardstick, long before taking college entrance exams. Local districts that excelled at educating children could be singled out, and ones who lagged could also be identified in order to address problems.
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/09/04/critics-claim-common-core-brings-chaos-not-accountability-to-classroom/
4TH GRADERS BEING TAUGHT THAT GOVERNMENT IS "YOUR FAMILY..."
Elementary students taught that government is 'your family'
Fourth-graders learning bad lesson? Watch the video here: http://video.foxnews.com/v/2643761138001/elementary-students-taught-that-government-is-your-family/?intcmp=obnetwork
Fourth-graders learning bad lesson? Watch the video here: http://video.foxnews.com/v/2643761138001/elementary-students-taught-that-government-is-your-family/?intcmp=obnetwork
COMMON CORE MAY BE SCARIER THAN OBAMACARE!!
This is POSSIBLY going to be REQUIRED READING for an 11th grader!!!! The link only is provided and when you access it, you will understand why! All one has to do is read the first 4-6 lines of the article to see what COMMON CORE is recommending for our children to read. ATROCIOUS!
http://politichicks.tv/column/warning-graphic-common-core-approved-child-pornography/
http://politichicks.tv/column/warning-graphic-common-core-approved-child-pornography/
Common Core: Nationalized State-Run Education
By Dean Kalahar April 12, 2013
Common Core, the new federal education standards, may look delicious; but before you take a bite out of the apple, it might be a good idea to know a razor is inside.
Like all Orwellian euphemisms, "Common Core" is not about innocent ideas like the word "common" or the term "core." The phrase "Common Core" is used to hide the real aspects of an education policy which if articulated openly would never be taken seriously, let alone be implemented.
Common Core is being driven by an amalgam of overt/covert actions, apathy, and Progressive passions, where their ends justify any means. Some people cheering Common Core seem to be unwittingly going along out of good intentions and laziness. While some on the bandwagon are motivated by the usual suspects of money and power, others have just been duped.
These varying alliances seem to be focused on the fact that Common Core's "lead architect," David Coleman, says he believes in the value of a liberal-arts education. The problem is nobody asked what a liberal-arts education means to Mr. Coleman. Reading his background puts new meaning to the word "liberal" in liberal arts.
David Coleman lives in trendy Greenwich Village, has never been a classroom teacher and wants to replace traditional subjects with broad learning. He believes there is "a massive social injustice in this country" and that education is "the engine of social justice." Coleman's leadership is questionable as he uses profanity ("s--t, f--k, bulls-t, a--) in speeches regarding Common Core. He graduated from liberal Yale, Oxford, and Cambridge universities and is a founding partner of Student Achievement Partners, and the Grow Network, acquired by textbook publisher McGraw-Hill. He is on the board of directors of The Equity Project Charter School, a middle school in New York City that paid $125,000 salaries to teachers yet had a 31.3% passing rate in English in 2010-11. His alliance with unions includes praise for "organizations like the UFT in New York City and the AFT statewide."
The foundational philosophy of Common Core is to create students ready for social action so they can force a social-justice agenda. Common Core is not about students who actually have a grasp of the intricate facts of a true set of what E.D. Hirsch would call "core knowledge." Common Core is about, as David Feith would say "an obsession with race, class, gender, and sexuality as the forces of history and political identity." Nationalizing education via Common Core is about promoting an agenda of Anti-capitalism, sustainability, white guilt, global citizenship, self-esteem, affective math, and culture sensitive spelling and language. This is done in the name of consciousness raising, moral relativity, fairness, diversity, and multiculturalism.
And David Coleman's upbringing is in line with this Progressive worldview. His mother and greatest influence, Elizabeth Coleman, president of Bennington College in Vermont, does not like the idea of "expertise" or "neutrality (as) a condition of academic integrity" and "wants to "make the political-social challenges themselves the organizers of the curriculum." She emphasizes an "action-oriented curriculum" where "students continuously move outside the classroom to engage the world directly." In short: indoctrination through propaganda in education as the vehicle for social transformation.
Mrs. Coleman founded a social justice initiative: the Center for the Advancement of Public Action (she called it a "secular church") "which invites students to put the world's most pressing problems at the center of their education." She was a professor of humanities at the far left New School for Social Research, which was begun by progressives in 1932 and modeled itself after the neo-Marxist social theory of the Frankfurt School. She fights for "social values," and a "secular democracy," saying "fundamentalist ...values (are) the absolutes of a theocracy."
President Obama and Education Secretary Duncan falsely said the Common Core standards were developed by the states and voluntarily adopted. Common Core was actually developed by an organization called Achieve and the National Governors Association, funded by the Gates Foundation by at least $173 million dollars. The states were bribed by $4.35 billion "Race to the Top" dollars if they adopted the standards. Former Texas State Commissioner of Education, Robert Scott, stated for the record that he was urged to adopt the Common Core standards before they were written.
Federal laws prohibit the U.S. Department of Education from prescribing any curriculum, but four billion is a big carrot -- or is it a stick? Forty-six states and the District of Columbia have sold out... I mean "signed on."
For all intent and purposes, Common Core is nationalized education. History has shown that state-run information control, which begins with education, has always lead to disastrous results (USSR, Germany, Cuba).
In fact, the U.S. Department of Education has started a Common Core "technical review process" of test "item design and validation." The test writing stage is where the specifics of content, or in this case progressive ideologies, are inserted. Test questions need content and context, and since Common Core is about subjective processes, the content can be added without ever notifying the public. This is where the sleight of hand occurs. After content is tied to test questions, textbook manufacturers will write the necessary content into their products, the teachers will teach the progressively-driven textbooks and the circle will be complete. Herein we see the dirty little Common Core secret, controlling what is tested is the methodology of controlling the curriculum.
Common Core is not actually about standards, it's about gaining control over the education system in a futile attempt to create a Progressive utopia using the important sounding academic umbrella of "standards." But ask yourself, haven't educators always had standards, guidelines, or benchmarks to guide curriculum? Please understand this is about power, control, and the agenda! Common Core is just the host carrier of the disease -- Progressive Secularism.
Core writers say "In our classrooms, it is the students' voices, not the teachers' that are heard" and that "the curriculum should not be the coverage of content, but rather the discovery of content," While reading at a particular grade level may be a part of Common Core's standard "rubric," what is read and taught is where doctrine comes alive.
Further proof of totalitarian control is seen in Common Core's nationwide student tracking system. Michelle Malkin writes the 2009 stimulus included a "State Fiscal Stabilization Fund" that mandated constructing "longitudinal data systems (LDS) to collect data on public-school students" that resulted in The National Education Data Model. Then in 2012, the U.S. Department of Education rewrote federal privacy laws to let it share a child's academic record with virtually anyone. States have begun combining student records of test scores, discipline history, medical records, nicknames, religion, political affiliation, addresses, extracurricular activities, bus stop times and psychological evaluations into a private database called inBloom.
This madness all makes sense if we ask why the teacher unions have suddenly embraced "tougher" standards (new unionism). Common Core's vague and subjective "liberal arts" standards play perfectly with the unions who are looking for a way around their pay being tied to teacher performance evaluations. The answer, make the standards as subjective and vague as possible. In this way teachers can be evaluated under what are being falsely called tougher Common Core "board certified" type standards. And since pay is now being tied to performance, Common Core's nonjudgmental subjective view of learning will create the illusion of being successful and accountable. The result, unions strike it rich.
David Coleman's self-proclaimed "mentor," David Sherman, holds the post of Consultant in the office of the AFT President Local 94 in Oak Lawn, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. He was once hired by union boss Albert Shanker to develop an "educational arm" for the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) in New York City where he was the union's liaison to the school system and collaborated with district and community organizations. Mr. Sherman became vice president of UFT in 1991. He was appointed to the U.S. Department of Education's Negotiated Rulemaking Committee on Title I and NCLB. Sherman sits on Teachscape's board of directors and also sits on the board of the Teachers Union Reform Network, the primary internal union organization in support of "new unionism."
Interestingly, The National Education Association is negotiating a deal with Teachscape, a private firm that will provide web-based teacher professional development services. Teachscape already has the American Federation of Teachers as a partner. Teachscape's professional development system includes: tools and opportunities for soft evaluation: "self-reflection and self-assessment" These are remarkably similar to the requirements for achieving national certification. The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) is also a partner of Teachscape. Many NEA and AFT officials sit on the NBPTS board. Teachers use textbooks from McGraw-Hill, which is a partner and investor of Teachscape.
If one listens and follows the words, the business connections, the union connections, the university connections, the money, and the ideology; a clear picture emerges as to what is driving the insanity. In a nutshell, the Common Core folks knew they had to rewrite the standards and create new standards that are not actually standards but windows of opportunity to spew, by law, ideas that would be laughable if they were not so politically correct and dangerous to the very foundations of the nation.
The Progressives have incrementally gone after the healthcare, family and economic systems. They have been slowly changing education for decades. Common sense about Common Core tells you they are now going after the whole enchilada. What is amazing is that it's happening right under the noses of academics on both side of the ideological spectrum who are supposed to know better.
Connect the dots and you can see Common Core is nationalized state-run education via an unprecedented partnership between public, private, union, and academic circles. It does not matter if Common Core is one part self interest, one part ignorance, and one part blind elite reality. Any way you slice it there is a razor inside Common Core representing a danger to American culture, education, and children.
Sources: M. Catharine Evans, Diane Ravitch, Washington Post, Education Intelligence Agency, Susan Ohanian , Michelle Maslkin, George Will, Jonathan DuHamel, Valerie Strauss, Neal McCluskey, Lindsey Burke, David Feith, CATO Institute, Heritage Foundation, transcripts.
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/04/common_core_nationalized_state-run_education.html#ixzz2dDKyrEOc
Common Core, the new federal education standards, may look delicious; but before you take a bite out of the apple, it might be a good idea to know a razor is inside.
Like all Orwellian euphemisms, "Common Core" is not about innocent ideas like the word "common" or the term "core." The phrase "Common Core" is used to hide the real aspects of an education policy which if articulated openly would never be taken seriously, let alone be implemented.
Common Core is being driven by an amalgam of overt/covert actions, apathy, and Progressive passions, where their ends justify any means. Some people cheering Common Core seem to be unwittingly going along out of good intentions and laziness. While some on the bandwagon are motivated by the usual suspects of money and power, others have just been duped.
These varying alliances seem to be focused on the fact that Common Core's "lead architect," David Coleman, says he believes in the value of a liberal-arts education. The problem is nobody asked what a liberal-arts education means to Mr. Coleman. Reading his background puts new meaning to the word "liberal" in liberal arts.
David Coleman lives in trendy Greenwich Village, has never been a classroom teacher and wants to replace traditional subjects with broad learning. He believes there is "a massive social injustice in this country" and that education is "the engine of social justice." Coleman's leadership is questionable as he uses profanity ("s--t, f--k, bulls-t, a--) in speeches regarding Common Core. He graduated from liberal Yale, Oxford, and Cambridge universities and is a founding partner of Student Achievement Partners, and the Grow Network, acquired by textbook publisher McGraw-Hill. He is on the board of directors of The Equity Project Charter School, a middle school in New York City that paid $125,000 salaries to teachers yet had a 31.3% passing rate in English in 2010-11. His alliance with unions includes praise for "organizations like the UFT in New York City and the AFT statewide."
The foundational philosophy of Common Core is to create students ready for social action so they can force a social-justice agenda. Common Core is not about students who actually have a grasp of the intricate facts of a true set of what E.D. Hirsch would call "core knowledge." Common Core is about, as David Feith would say "an obsession with race, class, gender, and sexuality as the forces of history and political identity." Nationalizing education via Common Core is about promoting an agenda of Anti-capitalism, sustainability, white guilt, global citizenship, self-esteem, affective math, and culture sensitive spelling and language. This is done in the name of consciousness raising, moral relativity, fairness, diversity, and multiculturalism.
And David Coleman's upbringing is in line with this Progressive worldview. His mother and greatest influence, Elizabeth Coleman, president of Bennington College in Vermont, does not like the idea of "expertise" or "neutrality (as) a condition of academic integrity" and "wants to "make the political-social challenges themselves the organizers of the curriculum." She emphasizes an "action-oriented curriculum" where "students continuously move outside the classroom to engage the world directly." In short: indoctrination through propaganda in education as the vehicle for social transformation.
Mrs. Coleman founded a social justice initiative: the Center for the Advancement of Public Action (she called it a "secular church") "which invites students to put the world's most pressing problems at the center of their education." She was a professor of humanities at the far left New School for Social Research, which was begun by progressives in 1932 and modeled itself after the neo-Marxist social theory of the Frankfurt School. She fights for "social values," and a "secular democracy," saying "fundamentalist ...values (are) the absolutes of a theocracy."
President Obama and Education Secretary Duncan falsely said the Common Core standards were developed by the states and voluntarily adopted. Common Core was actually developed by an organization called Achieve and the National Governors Association, funded by the Gates Foundation by at least $173 million dollars. The states were bribed by $4.35 billion "Race to the Top" dollars if they adopted the standards. Former Texas State Commissioner of Education, Robert Scott, stated for the record that he was urged to adopt the Common Core standards before they were written.
Federal laws prohibit the U.S. Department of Education from prescribing any curriculum, but four billion is a big carrot -- or is it a stick? Forty-six states and the District of Columbia have sold out... I mean "signed on."
For all intent and purposes, Common Core is nationalized education. History has shown that state-run information control, which begins with education, has always lead to disastrous results (USSR, Germany, Cuba).
In fact, the U.S. Department of Education has started a Common Core "technical review process" of test "item design and validation." The test writing stage is where the specifics of content, or in this case progressive ideologies, are inserted. Test questions need content and context, and since Common Core is about subjective processes, the content can be added without ever notifying the public. This is where the sleight of hand occurs. After content is tied to test questions, textbook manufacturers will write the necessary content into their products, the teachers will teach the progressively-driven textbooks and the circle will be complete. Herein we see the dirty little Common Core secret, controlling what is tested is the methodology of controlling the curriculum.
Common Core is not actually about standards, it's about gaining control over the education system in a futile attempt to create a Progressive utopia using the important sounding academic umbrella of "standards." But ask yourself, haven't educators always had standards, guidelines, or benchmarks to guide curriculum? Please understand this is about power, control, and the agenda! Common Core is just the host carrier of the disease -- Progressive Secularism.
Core writers say "In our classrooms, it is the students' voices, not the teachers' that are heard" and that "the curriculum should not be the coverage of content, but rather the discovery of content," While reading at a particular grade level may be a part of Common Core's standard "rubric," what is read and taught is where doctrine comes alive.
Further proof of totalitarian control is seen in Common Core's nationwide student tracking system. Michelle Malkin writes the 2009 stimulus included a "State Fiscal Stabilization Fund" that mandated constructing "longitudinal data systems (LDS) to collect data on public-school students" that resulted in The National Education Data Model. Then in 2012, the U.S. Department of Education rewrote federal privacy laws to let it share a child's academic record with virtually anyone. States have begun combining student records of test scores, discipline history, medical records, nicknames, religion, political affiliation, addresses, extracurricular activities, bus stop times and psychological evaluations into a private database called inBloom.
This madness all makes sense if we ask why the teacher unions have suddenly embraced "tougher" standards (new unionism). Common Core's vague and subjective "liberal arts" standards play perfectly with the unions who are looking for a way around their pay being tied to teacher performance evaluations. The answer, make the standards as subjective and vague as possible. In this way teachers can be evaluated under what are being falsely called tougher Common Core "board certified" type standards. And since pay is now being tied to performance, Common Core's nonjudgmental subjective view of learning will create the illusion of being successful and accountable. The result, unions strike it rich.
David Coleman's self-proclaimed "mentor," David Sherman, holds the post of Consultant in the office of the AFT President Local 94 in Oak Lawn, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. He was once hired by union boss Albert Shanker to develop an "educational arm" for the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) in New York City where he was the union's liaison to the school system and collaborated with district and community organizations. Mr. Sherman became vice president of UFT in 1991. He was appointed to the U.S. Department of Education's Negotiated Rulemaking Committee on Title I and NCLB. Sherman sits on Teachscape's board of directors and also sits on the board of the Teachers Union Reform Network, the primary internal union organization in support of "new unionism."
Interestingly, The National Education Association is negotiating a deal with Teachscape, a private firm that will provide web-based teacher professional development services. Teachscape already has the American Federation of Teachers as a partner. Teachscape's professional development system includes: tools and opportunities for soft evaluation: "self-reflection and self-assessment" These are remarkably similar to the requirements for achieving national certification. The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) is also a partner of Teachscape. Many NEA and AFT officials sit on the NBPTS board. Teachers use textbooks from McGraw-Hill, which is a partner and investor of Teachscape.
If one listens and follows the words, the business connections, the union connections, the university connections, the money, and the ideology; a clear picture emerges as to what is driving the insanity. In a nutshell, the Common Core folks knew they had to rewrite the standards and create new standards that are not actually standards but windows of opportunity to spew, by law, ideas that would be laughable if they were not so politically correct and dangerous to the very foundations of the nation.
The Progressives have incrementally gone after the healthcare, family and economic systems. They have been slowly changing education for decades. Common sense about Common Core tells you they are now going after the whole enchilada. What is amazing is that it's happening right under the noses of academics on both side of the ideological spectrum who are supposed to know better.
Connect the dots and you can see Common Core is nationalized state-run education via an unprecedented partnership between public, private, union, and academic circles. It does not matter if Common Core is one part self interest, one part ignorance, and one part blind elite reality. Any way you slice it there is a razor inside Common Core representing a danger to American culture, education, and children.
Sources: M. Catharine Evans, Diane Ravitch, Washington Post, Education Intelligence Agency, Susan Ohanian , Michelle Maslkin, George Will, Jonathan DuHamel, Valerie Strauss, Neal McCluskey, Lindsey Burke, David Feith, CATO Institute, Heritage Foundation, transcripts.
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/04/common_core_nationalized_state-run_education.html#ixzz2dDKyrEOc
COMMON CORE Education Without Representation
