Posted on 03/14/2015 5:07:07 PM PDT by kindred
Karen Lamoreaux addressed the Arkansas Board of Education in December 2013 to discuss the negative effects of Common Core on the local students. Mrs. Lamoreaux said that she represented more than 1,100 parents, educators, and taxpayers of Arkansas “who have very serious reservations about the Common Core initiative.” The mother of three children accused the board of falling for the same empty sales pitch that Common Core would be a “set of rigorous, college-ready internationally bench-marked standards that prepare our kids to compete in a global economy.”
Mrs. Lamoreaux instructed the members of the school board to participate in a Common Core math problem by getting their pencils out.
Are you smarter than a Common Core fourth grader? Let’s find out. The problem is: Mr. Yamato’s class has 18 students. If the class counts around by a number and ends with 90, what number did they count by?
After restating the math problem again, Mrs. Lamoreaux asked if anybody on the board knew the answer. One board member answered “five” by dividing 18 into 90. Mrs. Lamoreaux confirmed:
You know why? Because that’s what makes sense, right? That’s the way we were taught to do it in the fourth grade level.
Then she held up a Common Core math lesson that teaches students to solve this problem in a different way.
This, however, is what the Common Core Standards expect our fourth graders to do. If they solve it in those two steps they get it marked wrong. They are expected to draw 18 circles with 90 hashmarks solving this problem in exactly 108 steps. Board members, this is not rigorous. This is not college ready. This is not preparing our children to compete in a global economy.
Mrs. Lamoreaux went on to say that students who were in the upper eightieth percentile or greater in the previous year are now getting C’s, D’s, and F’s on their report cards. With passion in her voice, Mrs. Lamoreaux told the board that she and other parents will fight to change this curriculum that is “dumbing down our kids.”
I encourage you to listen to us when we send you our emails despite the comments that were made by our chairperson here today. Our concerns are not based on hysteria or propaganda. They are based on fact and we are prepared to present those facts. Can you see the trembling in my voice?
She concluded her time:
This is not working. And it’s not what they told you it would be. We will save the privacy concerns and the testing concerns for our legislature. But when it comes to standards, that’s your ball court. And we need you to help us with this because this program is dumbing our children down. Thank you.
In February, Governor Asa Hutchinson announced his plan to create a 16-person Common Core review committee that will take another look at the state standards. Many parents like Karen Lamoreaux are pleased with that decision.
Bill Bennett Gets Paid to Spin Common Core to ‘Conservatives’
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2014/09/12/bill-bennett-gets-paid-to-spin-common-core-to-conservatives/
Then, even if full-time homeschooling is not an option, teach your kids the real way when they’re at home, and tell them, “Look, we know the school’s not teaching anything useful anymore, so keep the following in mind: The law requires your physical presence in the classroom, and only that. It does not require you to actually do the work, so it’s OK with us if you just blow that crap off. Obey to the extent that is necessary for physical safety, but do your own thing otherwise. They can’t MAKE you do anything other than sit there.”
What Mrs L and the other parents should have done was pull their children from school and demand the board members resign.
Until then, their children will not attend govt. schools.
End of story.
“Tell me that the teachers don’t have blame for their work in the dumbing down of American children in public schools, a scourge of education and moral teaching.”
Teachers are responsible, and their ‘new ways’ have only bought more failure. That said the demand that work be shown is probably motivated by a concern for cheating. With calculators and computers today its easy enough to do the math problems using them rather than in your head.
Teachers however should be more flexible, and at some point we need to confront the reality of our technological world, and focus in mathematics more upon merely understanding the process than preforming the act.
“Don’t write CC in cursive because they’re not going to teach cursive anymore”
A friend thinks they quit teaching cursive so people won’t be able to read the Constitution and other founding documents as they were written. That way the libs can rewrite them as much as they like.
“a lot of problems have come up because are kids are using calculators for everything, digital watches instead of knowing how to read a circular watch...”
Exactly. Kids now need a fancy graphing calculator to take math classes in high school. They spend all their time learning the calculator instead of the math.
On the other hand, I just found my old calculator from college. I went through 4 years of majoring in engineering with it, and passed the EIT with it. No graphing and just the basic trig functions onit.
I agree; jam the system!
I still don’t understand the problem. There’s no way I could ever figure out the answer.
I ran into the same problem. My kids could do it the old way but had to show their work and were penalized. For grins I did one of their assignments and made a 50 because all the answers were right but my work steps were wrong. The meeting with the teacher was of course unproductive as she had to tow the school line.
Shortly thereafter we were in private school.
Wow. Kids deserve to be educated in the basics of reading and writing and math and not to be manipulated into a unproductive and foolish process of thinking that confuses the simple answers available. The public schools and universities of people thinking and doing that which is wrong because their ideas are wrong and the teachers unions are wrong.
Simply put, public education is both evil and counterproductive nowdays. God knows.
Soon, that 50 percent will have passed on and the mexicans, moslems and third world riff raff will view us as an ancient civilization like ancient greece.
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