[NEMDF]

Does “English” still include reading and writing skills? Just wondering.

[GeronL]

There should be zero involvement of the federal government in schools, ideally there should be no government schools at all.

This idea that DC knows how to make anything better, anything at all, is farcical. The left has an agenda and it is destroying this country rapidly, we should never trust them.

Still don’t understand?

[deweyfrank]

later

[GeronL]

Does your school have it’s own abortion clinic yet?

[jeffc]

An Eye opener. Thanks.

My wife is a teaching assistant at an Elementary school here in central Florida (she teaches ESE kids). She says she hasn't seen any identifiable CC stuff, and not much has changed there, if at all.

I wonder where all the scary info about the indoctrination stuff comes from, more liberal pablum crap. You are saying some of it is going away, what with the broadening of the reading material.

[slowhandluke]

It's not about teachers, it's about principles. Control of education is not one of the powers granted to the Federal Government.

It matters not what the current reading list is, the problem is that the power to set the reading list should not reside with the Federal Government.

The book "The Black Swan" by Taleb should be on your reading list. Top down control of anything is a very risky proposition. Bottom up control gives more resilience to error, and allows for innovation to be done safely, that is to be tried on small scales and tested over time.

[Eva]

What people worry about is the politicization of the content as stated. Kids being taught to read short bytes of information instead of whole books. What you are talking about is not the part that people are objecting to. We are objecting to the computerized teaching by testing.

Some school district are trying to put every kid on the computer, all at the same time, being fed curriculum over the internet, government curriculum that is more like the old SRA programmed reading program than a real literature program. The teachers will remain in the classroom to facilitate the internet learning and supplement it. I know this because they were trying to do it in my school district. They wanted 20 million dollar bond to pay for it. I had a friend on the committee that was doing the planning, a very liberal friend.

[Eva]

I forgot to mention that they want to teach science like an open book test. They want to teach students where they can find answers to science questions on the internet instead of mastering the subject. History will probably be the same.

[apoxonu]

Yeah? Let me know when the system adopts phonics again to teach speaking English; which is of course — a PHONETIC language.

While I would applaud any improvement in our schools, I am suspicious of any program that doesn’t teach the way kids were taught back when the USA was number one in the world in reading comprehension and writing, not to mention math and science. Today, we rank below freakin’ Zimbabwe in all international standards.

There was nothing wrong with teaching rote memorization for math, phonics and writing comprehension for English and all the other “old fashioned” techniques. They actually WORKED! But somewhere along the line, the unions and their puppets (teachers) decided that we should bring the smart kids down to the level of under-performing students and that parents should have little say in their children’s education.

Now, it’s been downhill all the way. I interviewed a new college graduate last week for a job. The application was filled with spelling errors and the kid couldn’t speak good English.

[SECURE AMERICA]

The basic problem is this. The Federal Government should have ZERO say in what is taught in our schools. While they could make suggestions and offer support, they should NEVER be the final say.

[Rockingham]

Thank you for an illuminating post; and, as befits a teacher of English, you have expressed yourself in a clear and persuasive manner!

[PubliusMM]

II find CC to be every bit as objectionable as earlier standards, but it has nothing to do with the curriculum. There is absolutely NO Constitutional authority for fedgov to be anywhere near the education of our children. In fact, the same should apply at the State level, IMO.
The enumerated powers of the US Constitution make NO reference to the education of our children, and so said education is reserved to the States, or to the People.

In short, get your hands off our kids! Your 12+ years of indoctrination are destroying the greatest nation ever to appear on the earth, and we are sick of it.

[E. Pluribus Unum]

This is why Freepers hate public education:

Einstein's definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result.

It's time to fire all the people who have run the show for the past 40+ years and try competition. Give the students a voucher, and let them decide where they want to go to school.

The purpose of Common Core is the same as every other "standard" in the past 40 years; equal outcome - how do we make the non-minority kids as dumb as the minority kids? All in the name of "fairness."

Credentialed to Destroy: How and Why Education Became a Weapon

[SECURE AMERICA]

I don’t expect a wave of support… my sad experience is that many Freepers hate teachers with such a livid passion that I wonder about them.

Love teachers. Have/had 3 relatives that were teachers. Have 4 current friends that are teachers. But not all teachers are equal. Not all school districts are equal and the larger the union involvement usually the worse things are.....

[patriotsoul]

If only the school districts would have their students read materials from ‘classic authors.’ I had to walk away from the school district I worked at for almost 10 years because of their bureaucracy and pitiful attempts to stand up for what is right instead of bowing down to the stupid pressure of political correctness. Yes, the district spent MILLIONS just in sensitivity training for every employee of the district because we had such a horrible, horrible book on the required reading list and it contained the N word. The book was Huckleberry Finn. No matter how loud some of us protested that Mark Twain produced some of the best novels in the 20th century and that it only depicted the times in which it was written, the pressure from Groups Representing the Foreigners immigrating to this country prevailed. Although our school board managed to mediate between the offended and the school and come to an adequate and fair solution, because this happened in Texas (and I guess it goes without saying that we are all racists), these “Groups” filed suit at the federal level and caused them to come in and help us decide what the best solution was — BAN that book from our libraries and DEMAND ALL EMPLOYEES go through sensitivity training. That is where disgust for Common Core lies, not so much at a classroom level. All decision-making at the local level is terribly diminished. California should have been at the forefront in teaching the nation how to educate children within their own surroundings. Sadly, it was the first to fall prey to the likes of LaRaza and LULAC. Shameful.

[Moonman62]

Thanks for letting us know. Being a public school teacher in California must be quite an experience.

[kidd]

...my sad experience is that many Freepers hate teachers with such a livid passion...

This is unfortunate. The public school teachers here in liberal Connecticut have been on our side, for the most part. They even worked with me to get around the previous teaching fad, "Chicago math". They encouraged my kid to bring in a replica rifle for a presentation on Davy Crockett. Civics in emphacized. They've been willing to allow fair presentations that promote the use of DDT and I've given a pro-nuclear power presentation.

Common Core math is terrible. It really is. But its a diffferent kind of terrible from the previous system. I view it as something that sucks just as bad as the old fad.

[Politicalkiddo]

I’m a senior in a CA high school. The public school system is awful. For example, I had to ask my history/government teacher why exactly she keeps referring to the US as a democracy. She made something up about it being “easier” to do so. I have to constantly listen to communistic “solutions” for fixing the country, along with constant whining about “rich” people not giving poor people money. While I have never excelled in math,I did fairly decently until I moved to CA. The explanations are nigh impossible for me to grasp. I can say that I’ve never had a problem with my English courses, but perhaps I don’t know what I’m missing.

[Hulka]

I teach US government at a local college.

I assign my students research papers (two).

Seriously, out of, say, 30 students in a class, about five will write something readable.

It is rare to find a freshman or sophomore that is able to read well, let alone express themselves coherently with thought and reason, backed by credible sources.

Sad to say the top performing students are the Asian students. This semester I have two, one from Singapore and the other from China. They both study, read, contribute and grasp the concepts of freedom, individual liberty and responsibility, and can explain why America has a constitution and why we have checks and balances. The US students barely keep their eyes open, if they come to class at all. Nonetheless, many are shocked and offended when they receive a grade less than a “B.”

While US students are mostly lazy, some wake up once they earn that “D” or “F” on their first paper. Some. Not many.

[ryan71]

Thanks for the education. I had really not heard anything about the English side of Common Core. All the examples I’ve seen up to this point were in Math. And thanks for your service as a teacher. As you pointed out, we need more conservative teachers.