First Common Core High School Grads Worst-Prepared For College In 15 Years

For the third time in a row since Common Core was fully phased in nationwide, U.S. student test scores on the nation’s broadest and most respected test have dropped, a reversal of an upward trend between 1990 and 2015. Further, the class of 2019, the first to experience all four high school years under Common Core, is the worst-prepared for college in 15 years, according to a new report.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress is a federally mandated test given every other year in reading and mathematics to students in grades four and eight. (Periodically it also tests other subjects and grade levels.) In the latest results, released Wednesday, American students slid yet again on nearly every measure.

Reading was the worst hit, with both fourth and eighth graders losing ground compared to the last year tested, 2017. Eighth graders also slid in math, although fourth graders improved by one point in math overall. Thanks to Neal McCluskey at the Cato Institute, here’s a graph showing the score changes since NAEP was instituted in the 1990s.

“Students in the U.S. made significant progress in math and reading achievement on NAEP from 1990 until 2015, when the first major dip in achievement scores occurred,” reported U.S. News and World Report. Perhaps not coincidentally, 2015 is the year states were required by the Obama administration to have fully phased in Common Core.

Common Core is a set of national instruction and testing mandates implemented starting in 2010 without approval from nearly any legislative body and over waves of bipartisan citizen protests. President Obama, his Education Secretary Arne Duncan, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Bill Gates, and myriad other self-described education reformers promised Common Core would do exactly the opposite of what has happened: improve U.S. student achievement. As Common Core was moving into schools, 69 percent of school principals said they also thought it would improve student achievement. All of these “experts” were wrong, wrong, wrong.

“The results are, frankly, devastating,” said U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said in a statement about the 2019 NAEP results. “This country is in a student achievement crisis, and over the past decade it has continued to worsen, especially for our most vulnerable students. Two out of three of our nation’s children aren’t proficient readers. In fact, fourth grade reading declined in 17 states and eighth grade reading declined in 31.”

On the same day the NAEP results were released, the college testing organization ACT released a report showing that the high school class of 2019’s college preparedness in English and math is at seniors’ lowest levels in 15 years. These students are the first to have completed all four high school years under Common Core.

“Readiness levels in English, reading, math, and science have all decreased since 2015, with English and math seeing the largest decline,” the report noted. Student achievement declined on ACT’s measures among U.S. students of all races except for Asian-Americans, whose achievement increased.

ACT was one of the myriad organizations that profited from supporting Common Core despite its lack of success for children and taxpayers. Its employees helped develop Common Core and the organization has received millions in taxpayer dollars to help create Common Core tests.

“ACT is one of the best barometers of student progress, and our college-bound kids are doing worse than they have in the ACT’s history,” said Center for Education Reform CEO Jeanne Allen in a statement.

These recent results are not anomalies, but the latest in a repeated series of achievement declines on various measuring sticks since Common Core was enacted. This is the opposite of what we were told would happen with trillions of taxpayer dollars and an entire generation of children who deserve not to have been guinea pigs in a failed national experiment.

Perhaps the top stated goal of Common Core was to increase American kids’ “college and career readiness.” The phrase is so central to Common Core’s branding that it is part of the mandates’ formal title for its English “anchor standards” and appears 60 times in the English requirements alone. Yet all the evidence since Common Core was shoved into schools, just as critics argued, shows that it has at best done nothing to improve students’ “college and career readiness,” and at worst has damaged it.

While of course many factors go into student achievement, it’s very clear from the available information that U.S. teachers and schools worked hard to do what Common Core demanded and that, regardless, their efforts have not yielded good results. A 2016 survey, for example, found “more than three quarters of teachers (76%) reported having changed at least half of their classroom instruction as a result of [Common Core]; almost one fifth (19%) reported having changed almost all of it.”

An October poll of registered voters across the country found 52 percent think their local public schools are “excellent” or “good,” although 55 percent thought the U.S. public school system as a whole is either just “fair” or “poor.” Things are a lot worse on both fronts than most Americans are willing to realize.

Compared to the rest of the world, even the United States’ top school districts only generate average student achievement, according to the Global Report Card. Common Core was touted as the solution to several decades of lackluster student performance like this that have deprived our economy of trillions in economic growth and would lift millions of Americans out of poverty. That was when U.S. test scores, while mediocre and reflecting huge levels of functional illiteracy, were better than they are now.

It is thus still the case, as it was when the Coleman Report was released 53 years ago, that U.S. public schools do not lift children above the conditions of their home lives. They add nothing to what children already do or do not get from at home, when we know from the track record of the distressingly few excellent schools that this is absolutely possible and therefore should be non-negotiably required. But because the people in charge of U.S. education not only neither lose power nor credibility but actually profit when American kids fail, we can only expect things to get worse.

I have tutored a lot of my freinds kids over the years in all levels of math from high school algebra, to calc, diff eq, Finite element analysis, statistics, and basic sciences such as physics, and chemistry, as well as a lot of programming. (Side note, moronials seem to be baffled at how I can “deny science). Anyway, I remember a particular time I was asked for help in how to graph rational equations... basically graph stuff like y = (x + 2) / ( x^2 + 3x + 2). Apparently he, and most of his class had been struggling with it for weeks. It looks scary, I know, but it actually is very easy to do this if you approach it correctly with a couple simple steps. Of course, I asked him to explain to me exactly how his teacher explained how to do this in detail. I received the most complicated treatIse of gobbledygook I had ever heard in my life and it was obvious why the class couldn’t get it. So I showed him patiently. Step 1 —-short simple and explanation why, step 2 and 3 the same. Every time I do this, on e they get past the not listening stage because they are convinced it is too hard and all they hear is static. Then they see you get the right answer in seconds. Then they all get that same skeptical look like you are somehow defying the laws of physics. Then they successfully do a problem or two while shaking their heads in disbelief and every one of them always sais “it can’t possibly be that easy”. Then they pull up harder ones to find a flaw or exception. At the end they are just stunned that something so impossible an hour ago is so trivial. I tell them to that to cement their knowledge, teach 3 of their freinds how to do this. They ask me why their teacher didn’t just explain it that way in the first place, I always respond that their teachers are democrats and an ignorant population is much easier to control

Yes, Common Core is bad - but the problem is not Common Core but rather the false beliefs that led to its creation in the first place.

In America, there is a widespread belief that if student outcomes are divergent that “the system is broken”.

Since divergent outcomes are caused by nature and not by methodology, and since divergent outcomes are documented and tracked more intensively than they have ever been, and since they have persisted despite “new math” and everything that has followed - the demand for, and velocity of, experimentation have continued to grow.

The “problem” that educational innovations are designed to fix - inequality of outcome - are not fixable. Not with money, not with buildings, not with breakfast, not with programs - not at all.

My late grandmother taught in NYC Public for 55 years starting in 1911. Her take on outcomes: “Somebody’s gotta clean the subways”.

Too bad they can’t put her in charge.

If Common Core was teaching the federal government’s constitutionally limited powers as the Founding States had intended for those powers to be understood, then grade school children would probably be able to tell us the following about Common Core.

From related threads…

The kids could tell us that President Thomas Jefferson and Justice Joseph Story had officially indicated that the states have never expressly constitutionally given the feds the specific power to dictate policy for INTRAstate schools. This includes no power to implement things like Common Core.

On a few articles of more general and necessary use, the suppression in due season will doubtless be right, but the great mass of the articles on which impost is paid is foreign luxuries, purchased by those only who are rich enough to afford themselves the use of them. Their patriotism would certainly prefer its continuance and application to the great purposes of the public education, roads, rivers, canals, and such other objects of public improvement as it may be thought proper to add to the constitutional enumeration of federal powers [emphases added].”—Thomas Jefferson : Sixth Annual Message to Congress
"The power to regulate manufactures, not having been confided to congress, they have no more right to act upon it, than they have to interfere with the systems of education, the poor laws, or the road laws, of the states [emphases added]. Congress is empowered to lay taxes for revenue, it is true; but there is no power to encourage, protect, or meddle with manufactures." —Joseph Story, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 1, Commentaries on the Constitution 2
”From the accepted doctrine that the United States is a government of delegated powers, it follows that those not expressly granted, or reasonably to be implied from such as are conferred, are reserved to the states, or to the people. To forestall any suggestion to the contrary, the Tenth Amendment was adopted. The same proposition, otherwise stated, is that powers not granted are prohibited [emphasis added].” —United States v. Butler, 1936.

Note that the schools are probably following the federal dollars regarding adopting federal Trojan Horse programs like Common Core. But if school children were being taught the fed's constitutionally limited powers then they could also probably clue us in that career federal lawmakers do not have the express constitutional power to tax and spend in the name of intrastate schooling.

"Congress is not empowered to tax for those purposes which are within the exclusive province of the States." --Justice John Marshall, Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.

In other words, funding-starved public schools that ignore their better judgement in order to satisfy requirements to receive unconstitutional federal funding are arguably recovering state revenues that the corrupt, post-17th Amendment ratification feds steal from the states, such revenues stolen by means of unconstitutional federal taxes according the Gibbons excerpt above.

Patriots need to eliminate the unconstitutional middleman, the corrupt feds, from “helping” the states to “manage” their revenues by supporting PDJT in cleaning up the swamp in the 2020 elections.

After citizens support PDJT in working with the new, post-2020 elections patriot Congress to put a stop to unconstitutional federal taxes, the states will ultimately find a tsunami of new revenues to improve schooling.

Remember in November 2020!

MAGA! Now KAG! (Keep America Great!)

And let's not overlook also cleaning up the state swamps in 2020.

"The “Holy Grail” of organized crime is to control government power to tax." —me
"The 16th Amendment effectively repealed the involuntary servitude aspect of the 13th Amendment imo, evidenced by unconstitutional federal taxes." —me
- "Congress is not empowered to tax for those purposes which are within the exclusive province of the States." —Justice John Marshall, Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.
- "13th Amendment, Section 1:
  Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude [emphasis added], except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
- "16th Amendment:
  The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration."
"The constitutionally undefined political parties are basically rival, corrupt voter unions, “union dues” paid by means of unconstitutional federal taxes.” —me
"The smart crooks long ago figured out that getting themselves elected to federal office to make unconstitutional tax laws to fill their pockets is a much easier way to make a living than robbing banks." —me
"Federal career lawmakers probably laugh all the way to the bank to deposit bribes for putting loopholes for the rich and corporations in tax appropriations laws, Congress actually not having the express constitutional authority to make most appropriations laws where domestic policy is concerned. Such laws are based on stolen state powers and uniquely associated stolen state revenues." —me

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ANOTHER REASON TO HOMESCHOOL