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.

[GeronL]

teen living???

[Bon of Babble]

YES!!

Believe it or not, home ec departments have been mostly eliminated - cooking, sewing, etc. Gardening too, except on a VERY limited basis. Lots of kids came to school b/c of fun electives, some even found career callings through these classes. No more.

Classes like teen living and marriage and the family are book-based classes — but they still beat trying to teach the new PC-driven/global warming/social justice curriculum that is overtaking math, science and English.

I’m waiting for it to hit the art curriculum, I have a feeling we art teachers are not going to escape.

[BruceDeitrickPrice]

Thanks for posting this. There are a lot of interesting comments. It’s kind of exciting to watch the tide turn on CCC.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the ping!