Common core education has been a bigger failure than Microsoft Office Clippy

Bill Gates and Gates Foundation were one of the main backers of the Common core education program. The US education system had been bad before Bill Gates, George HW Bush and Obama and No child left behind and Common Core. However, the last 17 years have been continued failure in improving education in the USA.

The Gates Foundation has spent $3.4 billion on public education in the United States. They spent a lot on the development and implementation of the highly controversial Common Core State Standards – Gates now says that 60 percent of his new investment will go to public schools and about 15 percent to the development of charter schools.

The Common Core standards were sold as a way to improve achievement and reduce the gaps between rich and poor, and black and white. But the promises haven’t come true. Even in states with strong common standards and tests, racial achievement gaps persist. The development of the Common Core was funded almost entirely by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In 2001, George W. Bush administration had passed the No Child Left Behind act. This promoted standardized testing, school choice, competition and accountability (meaning punishment of teachers and schools) as the primary means of improving education.

In 2009 President Obama announced Race to the Top, a competition for $4.35 billion in federal grant money. To qualify, states had to adopt “college and career ready standards,” a requirement that was used to pressure them into adopting national standards. Almost every state applied, even before the specifics of the Common Core were released in June 2010.

OECD data that shows lagging performance of American students overall, the national averages mask a bigger story.

When disaggregated by race, we see two Americas. One where white students perform along the lines of the best in the world—with achievement comparable to countries like Finland and Korea. And another America, where Black and Latino students perform comparably to the students in the lowest performing OECD countries, such as Chile and Greece.

Clippy as in microsoft Office 97 as a digital assistant. Just seeing the image of it, you can see why it was a failure.

I have had children in school where they were taught Common Core for several years.

1. Common Core uses multiple methods to teach basic math and english. They reteach multiplication and division. They add an emphasis on the concept of grouping. I know basic math very well. I can understand what they are trying to do but find that it merely complicates and confuses the learning of basic math. Getting kids bogged down in what are garbage approaches means there is less time for moving on to more advanced topics.

I knew Common Core was garbage from the first times I had to look and help with my kids homework. It does not help the smart kids and helps very few of the kids who do not get an understanding via the first “regular” approaches to learning those subjects.

2. For more well off parents, getting to Finland and Korea level academic achievement is only possible by either supplementing public school with extra private programs like Russian Math or sending kids to better private schools. Either that or achievement is made in spite of poor public school.

Finland is cited as an education success story but not enough is done to copy what works in Finland’s education system.

Finland put more resources and focus on improving the capabilities of teachers. All Finish Teachers have masters degrees. Teachers are viewed as scientists and the classrooms are their laboratories. Every teacher has to have a masters degree, and it’s a content degree where they’re not just taking silly courses on education theory and history. They’re taking content courses that enable them to bring a higher level of intellectual preparation into the classroom.

1. John Dewey’s philosophy of education forms a foundation for academic, research-based teacher education in Finland and influenced also the work of the most influential Finnish scholar professor Matti Koskenniemi in the 1940s. All primary school teachers read and explore Dewey’s and Koskenniemi’s ideas as part of their courses leading to the master’s degree. Many Finnish schools have adopted Dewey’s view of education for democracy by enhancing students’ access to decision-making regarding their own lives and studying in school.

Unlike in most other countries, cooperative learning has become a pedagogical approach that is widely practiced throughout Finnish education system.

The overall goal of schooling in Finland was to support child’s holistic development and growth by focusing on different aspects of talent and intelligence. After abolishing all streaming and tracking of students in the mid-1980s, both education policies and school practices adopted the principle that all children have different kinds of intelligences and that schools must find ways how to cultivate these different individual aspects in balanced ways. Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences became a leading idea in transferring these policy principles to school practice. Again, the 1994 National Curriculum emphasizes that school education must provide all students with opportunities to develop all aspects of their minds. As a consequence, that curriculum framework required that all schools have a balanced program, blending academic subjects with art, music, crafts, and physical education. This framework moreover mandated that all schools provide students with sufficient time for their self-directive activities.

Without frequent standardized and census-based testing, the Finnish education system relies on local monitoring and teacher-made student assessments.

5. Peer coaching—that is, a confidential process through which teachers work together to reflect on current practices, expand, improve, and learn new skills, exchange ideas, conduct classroom research and solve problems together in school—became normal practice in school improvement programs and professional development in Finland since the mid-1990s.

One aspect no one will acknowledge is the homogeneity of Finland. I’ve seen the video which lauds Finland’s system. Every teacher and student look alike. And it’s not just racial homogeneity , it’s cultural which I think is even more significant . We do not have that in this country. We went the diversity- is -most -important route... Finland does not have to deal with multiculturalism that we have embraced as more important than actual education.

Lately, for some reason (and oh, it’s near the toilet) I’ve been reading Gates’ now-ancient book “The Road Ahead”, and it seems pretty prophetic.

Well, with one exception - he thought the PC was going to make the phone obsolete.

The Finnish system will never get started here until we get rid of the teacher’s union and the so called Education Degree. Requiring all public school teachers to have masters degrees in the subjects they teach and measuring the competence of teachers will never happen as long as the NEA and the other teachers unions are still running the education of our kids.

Ah. Another broad brush stroke artist, armed with more prejudice and emotion than facts. In NYC, teachers are required to get their masters degree within a few years or lose their position. And then, they are required to take some pretty stiff exams covering their pedagogical expertise as well as their expertise in their license area. News flash: The union has NOTHING to do with these requirements.

The union has NOTHING to do with the curricula used in schools either. It used to be in the hands of administrators. Now it's in the hands of politicians who are blatantly ignorant about the education paradigm, who snap up unproven, usually leftist-progressive "panaceas" and who then force these on administrators who then force it on down the line. Commie Core was music to the ears of both the leftist moron governor Cuomo and his leftist moron counterpart mayor of NYC, Comrade Bill DeBlASSio. They ate that unproven garbage right up and forced it on all the teachers they controlled. Never mind that many states promptly shed that garbage after it proved to be a miserable system, NY had to keep its Commie Core to the bitter end. That's politicians you should be pointing your little finger at, not the union.

The unions have everything to do with getting those leftist politicians in office.

My husband was a teacher for 24 years. Every time the NEA/AFT mag came in the mail was like lemon juice in a paper cut, drove me nuts that were forced to contribute to that garbage. Look at what your dues pay for. IIRC, the largest chunk of the pie chart was political activism. The unions invest heavily in getting leftists elected.

The unions are complicit in turning the education system into an indoctrination system. That’s a goal of leftists.

Look at what your dues pay for. IIRC, the largest chunk of the pie chart was political activism. The unions invest heavily in getting leftists elected.

I, and many of my colleagues, quit paying COPE to the union. COPE was a small voluntary additional payment to the union, ostensibly for political lobbying causes for the teachers' benefit. It's probably like your IIRC. Instead, the union squandered our dues on lavish banquets for themselves, junkets to exotic vacation places on the premise they were "studying the education system there" (ha!), paying for busing people to lobbies for criminals like Eric Garner, and many other non-teacher-benefitting causes. So, I halted my COPE payments, as did many other educators. Our union is totally corrupt, I won't argue that. But, they do not make up these progressive curricula. The forcing of this garbage on teachers is on the politicians. The unions don't do very much to back their teachers up, less and less every year. So glad I retired a year ago and got off the no-win merry go round teaching has become in NYC.

All the time my children were in public schools, I met maybe five really smart and professional teachers. I homeschooled one sons for most of his education and he’s done the best in advanced education.

I think public schools will always be second class because first, the teachers and subject material are dumbed down and second, the classes are too big.

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