Posted on 05/20/2013 8:29:08 AM PDT by george76
Why does the U.S. Constitution make no mention of education? Because the Founding Fathers understood that the education of children must be at the local level. We now stand at the edge of a cliff as the federal Common Core State Standards continues its march across the country.
How did we get here? In 2009, the U.S. Department of Education blackmailed the states with stimulus money in the form of Race to the Top (RTTT) grants. If states wanted to get out from under No Child Left Behind, and wanted more funding they had to agree to adopt the Common Core. Most states (already underfunded by the federal government) jumped on the bandwagon.
(Excerpt) Read more at lakepowellchronicle.com ...
Common Core = Commie Lore
Here in Lake County, Ohio, Common Core means that the idiots who’re teaching our kids can now teach really stupid things to the kids. It’s called public education. Ya’ know . . . 2 plus 2 is kinda’ sorta’ 4 or it could be 5 if you’re not sure . . . but don’t worry about it.
Those old mindless things like math tables are gone . . . all ya’ gotta’ do is be close in math. It’s self-esteem for teachers and students on steroids.
Actually, they probably assumed the parents would take care of it. Universal government operated education didn't start till the middle of the 19th century, IIRC, and the proponents were openly collectivist big-government advocates. Yet people still did what they wanted. Go figure.
It's attitudes like that which destroy the reputation of Americans as engineers.
That’s the idea, amigo. America needs to be taken down a peg or two, don’t ya know.
Not here in Accomack County, Virginia. Answers have to be exact, not close, and they better know the formula or table to do the work.
Math tables are gone?
I am speechless.
We've raised a bunch of kids. A lot of them would have no trouble with this work. But they're natural students and were very early readers. If they were grouping the kids, this work would be fine for the top level. But they're not grouping the kids these days and they expect all the 7 year olds to be able to do this.
My grandson is probably a high average student. His passion at this point in his life is sports. He could do all this work perfectly if we disregarded his passion. We're not about to do that. That means he routinely gets two or three wrong on a spelling test. That is something we never would've permitted with our own kids but these standards are ridiculous.
I predict they'll be history in two or three years. There's no way most parents from the inner city even know what some of these vocab words mean. Forget about helping their kids with the homework.
I teach at an adult vocational junior college here in Northeast Ohio . . . and at least 1/2 of all my high school or GED students have no idea what a math table is . . . 4 X 4? Forget it. And that's just math.
I also teach English . . . parts of speech? Forget it.
And our high schools list almost 51% of their students on their Honor Rolls . . . 51% . . . impossible . . . 51%
Take the time, sometime, to count the names that are listed in the Honor Rolls listed in your newspapers. I did that once . . . it was boring but so very informative. I counted 3 different schools, called the schools and asked for their enrollment figures, and found that they were all over 50%, just around 51%.
We actually have good schools where we are....but they are implementing this common core. We’ve decided to go to private school route....
That's not true. These days the teachers expect the kids to understand and describe the mathematical processes used to derive the answer. Memorizing the math facts would be easier. It would also be a huge improvement. Kids have the rest of their lives to figure out the process. If they even need to, which in most cases they won't.
Here's a sample second grade math question from October of this year. There are 150 pencils. 10 pencils in each box. How many boxes of pencils are there? Not so easy to figure out when you don't yet know how to multiply and divide.
Oh I know it. It's one thing I hate about "the industry" regarding my field: Computer Science. -- There's a lot of companies that want "coders" rather than "software engineers" (the difference being the later solve problems and consider impacts of design, while the former can degenerate into "script kiddies"). It's at the point where if you don't know (or like) C-style languages you're considered 'weird' (perhaps unemployable) though there are easily demonstrable flaws in even at the syntax-level which have been addressed/solved in other languages. (I could give examples, but then it'd become a rant.)
It's a microcosm of the same principle behind the "Graduate's Catch-22", where in order to get entry into a job you need X-years of experience in the field, and in order to get experience in the field you need a job -- it's that companies want cookie-cutter employees, and in order to do that they cannot use "non-standard"* languages/tools even if those tools/languages are better suited to the problems that company is [trying] to address. (See the term technical debt.)
* -- By "non-standard" I mean "less common", not one which lacks a standard.
No wonder it was so important to the Obama administration to kick that family back to Germany. The precident would have tied their hands completely.
Where the hell is THAT school? I'm telling you what we get out of our public schools locally, and it's pathetic . . . and I don't live in the Cleveland ghetto . . . this is a suburban area. If your kids are not in parochial schools, forget it.
Here’s an email I received two days ago.
Backlash Against Common Core
The national news media haven’t discovered it, but the issue that is bringing out hundreds of citizens who never before attended political meetings is Common Core (CC). More precisely, it is the attempt of Barack Obama’s Department of Education to force all states and schools to adopt specified national education standards for each grade level that will dictate what all kids learn and don’t learn.
Common Core means federal control of school curriculum, i.e., control by Obama Administration leftwing bureaucrats. Federal control will replace all curriculum decisions by state and local school boards, state legislatures, parents, and even Congress because Obama bypassed Congress by using $4 billion of Stimulus money to promote Common Core.
It’s not only public schools that must obey the fed’s dictates. Common Core will control the curriculum of charter schools, private schools, religious schools, Catholic schools, and homeschooling.
The control mechanism is the tests. Kids must pass the tests in order to get a high school diploma, admittance to college, or a GED. If they haven’t studied a curriculum based on Common Core, they won’t score well on the tests.
Common Core cannot be described as voluntary. Since CC is so costly to the states (estimated at $15 billion for each state for retraining teachers and purchase of computers for all kids to take the tests), CC is foisted on the locals by a combination of bribes, federal handouts, and as the price for getting a waiver to exempt a state from other obnoxious mandates such as No Child Left Behind.
Don’t be under any illusion that Common Core will make kids smarter. The Common Core academic level is lower than what many states use now, and the math standards are so inferior that the only real mathematician on the validation committee refused to sign off on the math standards.
He said the CC standards are two years behind international expectations by the 8th grade, and fall further behind in grades 8 to 12. The CC math standards downgrade the years when algebra and geometry are to be taught.
Parents will have a hard time helping their children with their math homework. CC standards call for teaching kids to add columns of figures from left to right instead of right to left.
CC advocates claim that the new standards will make students college-ready. That promise is a play on words: students will be ready only to enter a two-year nonselective community college.
Common Core means government agencies will gather and store all sorts of private information on every schoolchild into a longitudinal database from birth through all levels of schooling, plus giving government the right to share and exchange this nosy information with other government and private agencies, thus negating the federal law that now prohibits that. This type of surveillance and control of individuals is the mark of a totalitarian government.
Common Core reminds us of how Communist China gathered nosy information on all its schoolchildren, stored it in manila folders called dangans, and then turned the file over to the kid’s employer when he left school.
The New York Times once published a picture of a giant Chinese warehouse containing hundreds of thousands of these folders. That was in the pre-internet era when information was stored on paper; now data collection and storage are efficiently managed on computers in a greater invasion of privacy.
Common Core is encrusted with lies. It is not, as advertised, “state” written; it is a national project created in secret without any input from teachers or state legislatures. It is not “internationally benchmarked”; that never happened.
The readings assigned in the CC English standards are 50 percent “informational” texts instead of great American and English literature and classics. The result is that CC standards are very political.
The suggested readings include a salestalk for government health care (such as ObamaCare) and global warming propaganda (including a push for Agenda 21). Some of the fiction suggested is worthless and even pornographic, presumably chosen to reflect contemporary life. Another suggested reading favorably describes Fidel Castro and his associates without any indication they are tyrants, Communists, and mass murderers.
We should take a bit of advice from our neighbor to the north. Canada has no national standards (all standards are adopted locally) and not even any national Department of Education.
CC advocates admit the standards cannot be changed or errors corrected because they are already printed and copyrighted. Bills to repeal CC have been filed in Oklahoma, Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, Alabama, South Dakota and Georgia, and Indiana Governor Mike Pence just signed a law to “pause” the CC implementation and hold public hearings.
My grandson is in a parochial school - the Philadelphia Archdiocese uses the Core Standards. Although, like I said, I don’t think they’ll be using it for long - I give it two years, three at the most.
It took thousands of years for man to deduce the mathematical algorithms. What possible sense does it make to force children to it all over again? You are correct.
Sometimes, it makes perfect sense to teach concepts backwards. Start with the long division algorithm and an understanding of what's going on will come with repetition.
There isn't time for kids to have to reinvent everything.
In addition to the ridiculous second grade vocab I listed in my post #9 above, here are a few more - accolade, archaic, semblance, dappled, habitat. I challenge everyone to quiz the first dozen adults they meet. It’s unlikely they could define all these second grade vocab words I’ve listed here and above. And yet, some of those same adults are almost certainly productive responsible taxpayers. I feel like the Core Standards have pushed fourth grade into second grade and they’re leaving behind 75% of the kids in the process.
This is a common assertion by people even though they acknowledge that Public Education is a disaster, their school is good
The same logic applies to Congressmen, even though Congress has an approval rating somewhere around 3% the incumbent will retain their seat, because everyone thinks their congressman is great, it is just all the other congress critters that are crooks.
I don't care what school your children go to, they are getting indoctrinated into Marxism, and that includes private schools and religious schools, with few exceptions.
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