Common Core: Anatomy of a Failure

The American Thinker ^ | 3-30-14 | Bruce Deitrick Price

[afraidfortherepublic]

When Bill and Melinda Gates go to Africa and see healthy people and sick people, they presumably have a single thought: what can we do to make everyone healthy? The problems are easily understood; goals can be clearly stated. Given a big commitment, there’s a high chance of success.

~snip~

What fascinates Bill Gates is something else entirely: namely, the variety and incoherence from school to school, city to city, and state to state. It looks so messy and inefficient. And he thinks: a guy with my money and management skills should be able to organize all this disorder, turn it into an efficient machine, save the country, and make another fortune in the process.

~snip~

But at that moment he has lost the game. Because he is no longer talking about educational goals, which must be our main concern. He is talking about standardization. He is talking about a tidier assembly line. (But nobody ever said that democracy is supposed to be tidy. Dictatorship is tidy.)

Bill Gates brought a programmer’s sensibility to education. There is a maximally efficient way to design a piece of software. So let’s do that, and stop all this other nonsense. Bad plan, even with the best of intentions.

~snip~

If you state that henceforth all children should be able to do X, because that’s the new standard, does this mean that all children can do X? Can even half the children do X? Read some of the verbose standards, and you’ll probably conclude that virtually no kid can do X.

~snip~

Bill Gates and Common Core are obsessed with arranging things in standardized patterns, coast to coast. So we must have standards that will somehow apply to everyone. Then we need identical curricula, and we’ll need identical tests.

[RC51]

“There is a maximally efficient way to design a piece of software”

This isn’t at all true. There are so many different ways to go about software design that efficient code or operation is a secondary concern to many many other factors. I can design the same piece of software in .NET, JAVA, C etc. What database, what middleware etc etc... Once you have all that put down and you’re actually writing code do you go pure Object Oriented or Procedural, maybe a hybrid?

I can write some incredibly efficient code, but it would be unreadable and barely maintainable. Familiar with really long Regex anyone? So most software engineers balance efficiency with maintainability.

Bottom line is Software design is not a Science, it’s an Art.

[luckystarmom]

My kids’ private school has started using it this year.

I’m pretty sure that is why we are having problems with 11th grade US history. It’s the strangest class we’ve ever had at the school. It’s mostly projects outside of class. The class time is spent reading “primary sources” which are things like journals or other first hand accounts of what was going on at the time.

I think they are using it in English also, but that teacher is more experienced.

[goldi]

My sister-in-law’s private girls school (where the governor of the state sent his daughters) does not and will not use Common Core. Bill Gate’s children’s school does not use Common Core, and if I remember correctly, the NY State Commissioner of Education sends his kids to a private school that does not use Common Core.

It’s only for the peasant class.

[luckystarmom]

And Gates shouldn’t be the one talking standardization. Microsoft is horrible. Apple would be the one to talk to about standardization.

My husband and I are both software engineers. We think Commin Core was written by a bunch of people who are good at writing. So the kids that are good at math and science will be screwed.

I’m sorry, but it you are good at math you just do most of it in your head. Who cares how you did it if you get the right answer.

[goldi]

I can see using primary sources for research. That’s a good idea. I think the math curriculum is nuts.

Maybe your school is picking and choosing what they want and doesn’t buy into the whole curriculum.

[Bon of Babble]

True.

But they are still beholden to the SAT, ACT and AP exams if they plan to attend college which are being re-written as I write this to reflect CC standards.

I am a teacher, this is being shoved down my throat and I am receiving “training” in new state, SAT, ACT and AP testing methods that reflect CC alignment, especially its emphasis on “social justice” and global warming issues.” The tests reflect this because I’ve seen the prototype questions.

I do not know a single teacher who is in favor of this garbage, we highly resent it and what it is teaching the next generation of young Americans.

[goldi]

Then it looks like a bunch of kids who go to snooty private schools are going to be flipping hamburgers for a living.

Bill Gates will be so proud.

[Whenifhow]

Common core is part of Agenda 21

Clint Richardson - Common Core, Agenda 21, And Global Privatization

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oglZEZz_YcE

2 hours 50 minutes (upload date Dec 22, 2013)

This Power Point lecture was given in November, 2013 at the Utah County Fairgrounds by Clint Richardson

There are links under the video of other presentations by Clint Richardson.

At one hour mark: Begins to talk about common core
Around one hour 12 min: Talks about social security being in all countries HQ in Switzerland

At one hour 33 minutes: George HW Bush Executive Order, 1993 > EO 12803 Infrastructure Privatization

At one hour 42 minutes: State and local gov’t can be a school district

At 1:44 : Talks about courts being overseen by bar association – Don’t really have 3 branches of gov’t.

At 1:45: State services Organization – states have offices in DC – Hall of States
All of gov’t is done with NGO’s
The politicians meet and create the legislation and it is rubber stamped.

At 1:55 minutes: NGA – Governors Association is an NGO
Common core information is through the end of the video.

[BenLurkin]

The creators of Common Core will not consider it a failure — so long as it centralizes education/indoctrination in America.

[galtman]

“Americans are so enamored of equality, they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.”
Alexis de Tocqueville

[luckystarmom]

I don’t mind primary sources as a supplement, but the teacher rarely lectures. They do tons of group projects.

It’s a bizarre class. My gifted daughter hates it, but has good grades. Her twin sister with special needs hares it and her grades are bad. She’s not learning anything, especially from the group work. The other kids in the group are basically doing the work. My daughter thinks that is wrong on multiple fronts.

I wonder if colleges will stop requireing the SAT after it switches to common core next year.

[GeronL]

I heard a lot of Catholic schools are using C C

[Sherman Logan]

Yes. It is much, much easier to create equality in a horse race by handicapping the leaders than by getting the scrubs to run faster.

I don’t believe this is a concious goal, at least for the great majority of “education reformers,” but it is inevitably implicit in their goal of reducing inequality of outcome.

The true goal of education, IMO, is to help every single child reach his/her maximum potential. If that were possible, then every single child would fare better than under present conditions. But the gap between the top and bottom would also be much greater than now.

[E. Pluribus Unum]

It is definitely a "conscious goal."

Has been since the days of Johann Gottlieb Fichte gaining control of the German education system after the Napoleonic wars.

The fact that so many Germans could be herded like sheep to follow Hitler can be directly attributed to Fichte's vision of what education should be about.

[E. Pluribus Unum]

http://educationordoamoris.wordpress.com/2011/09/19/destroy-the-free-will-or-hitlers-take-on-education/

[TEXOKIE]

Pinging the Agenda 21 interest group!

Thanks for the heads up, Whenifhow!

[Sherman Logan]

Oh, is that because working class people are too stupid to let their children be properly educated? They would probably teach their children the awful values that accompany a working-class life. Damn those hard-working, inadequately compensated working class parents. Damn you.

"Working class" is a term that has many and varied meanings, especially over time.

The German working class of 1807 has essentially nothing at all to do with what most of us probably think of as the working class, the blue collar American workers of most of the 20th century. That working class has largely disappeared along with the jobs they did.

Today, the "working class" is often just used, especially by liberals, to mean "the poor," and it is a class that on average does remarkably little work.

[Slyfox]

It passed the spell-checker!

[goldi]

Some colleges are not requiring the SAT now. That’s the argument my sister-in-law made when she said her school would never use Common Core.

[Bon of Babble]

Thanks.

I’m amassing quite an arsenal on this beast that’s being unleashed as I’m writing this. Teachers, if they can, are starting to retire in droves to get away from CC - these are experienced, highly effective, hard core teachers of math, English, non-PC history, AP science, who came in in the old days, when there was strict subject matter testing for teachers, before ed schools switched to pedagogy over subject matter, and are completely dedicated to student learning. They are keenly aware that the methods they’re going to be forced to use to teach PC social justice issues across the curriculum are going to be a disaster.

One of my cousins is throwing in the towel this year, a bit early, he teachers AP physics and calculus in a university town and said he won’t teach what CC requires and teach according to CC methods (mostly student “guessing” and “estimating” answers).

In California, my evaluation will be based on CC test scores and soon, I’m sure, my salary. My union is opposed to CC but has been completely emasculated.

I was able to switch to an almost entire schedule of electives a few years ago, art, gardening, teen living, things like that that are still required for graduation — before CC hit (I saw it coming a mile away, we all did). I do have two classes (unfortunately) that are part of the core subject curriculum and I would drop those in a heartbeat if I could. Electives aren’t subjected to strict testing schedules and evaluation methods as are math, English, science, etc.

DH says I’ve got two more years (he keeps an eye on our retirement status).