Posted on 08/25/2013 1:39:28 PM PDT by lowbridge
I have been teaching for over twenty years. Generally, I have been given either no curriculum or curriculum that was focused on skills, not specific texts. I would have to get those skills taught in whatever way I wanted to get there. Sometimes I was given more direction and that direction was generally pretty good including texts, key terms, supplemental stories, and suggested writing assignments. These directions were created at a school level by the teachers in the school. I helped write some myself. Mostly, I have had a lot of freedom in how I could achieve the learning goals.
Not anymore.
Today I was in a professional development session for my school district. Our school system has swallowed the Common Core curriculum whole. Why wouldn’t they? The federal system has said that it is “voluntary”, but “voluntary” means that the district gets cut off from major federal funding if it does not adopt the standards, so “voluntary” is subjective. Here is what the Washington Post reported Sen. Charles Grassley has to say about Common Core:
Current federal law makes clear that the U.S. Department of Education may not be involved in setting specific content standards or determining the content of state assessments. Nevertheless, the selection criteria designed by the U.S. Department of Education for the Race to the Top Program provided that for a state to have any chance to compete for funding, it must commit to adopting a “common set of K-12 standards” matching the description of the Common Core.
The Washington Post also reported, “The Republican National Committee recognizes the CCSS for what it is — an inappropriate overreach to standardize and control the education of our children…”
(Excerpt) Read more at dcclothesline.com ...
I don’t understand how the Asians manage to standardize education and get great results while Americans can’t do it without screwing everything up.
Here’s the deal. Education better be taught in Espanol because the Baby Boomers who funded the Federal Government for the last 50 years didn’t have enough children to fund your bullshit! They couldn’t AFFORD to! Y’all hate us now? Come on, come on!!!
Probably because they aren't afraid the kids will grow up knowing too much to vote Socialist. :)
Asian countries generally start with smart kids and then don’t subject them to ed school/teachers union claptrap. Nationalizing standards IMO is not fundamental to their results.
I'll go out on a limb and surmise the Asian Nations you reference don't have powerful Teachers Unions.
Education in Mexico and most of Latin America is much better than here, because they actually manage to teach kids to read and do basic math, which is why your Latin American yard guy can actually go on and found his own landscaping business once he has earned a little money here.
We need to go back to teaching kids facts. The problem with “Common Core” is that while it sounds like it’s teaching facts (”original sources”), it’s not. It’s actually aimed at teaching them the conclusions they should draw from reading one or another thing. In other words, it’s indoctrination.
Kids simply need to learn how to read, how to write coherently, and how to do math. They also need a basic civics course (that is, government structure, how and why to vote, etc.) and a basic history course that at least enables them to distinguish between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. I can tell you from personal experience that even college students are shaky on this.
The kids I know are shaky on the difference between Germans and Russians. They're not sure what language they speak in Venezuela (Venezuelan?). They're not clear what the difference is between the two world wars and who fought who. They don't know math. They don't know history. They don't know geography. They haven't read the classics. Nothing.
Our education system doesn't educate, it only indoctrinates, and does a poor job even at that. Kids are graduating with a cartoon understanding of the world at large. I just shake my head. Good kids, mind you, but clueless.
Honorable livius. That’s not the typical migrant I’m speaking of. You know it too.
"Race to the Top," indeed. I take from this two unintended meanings:
- First, race has been pushed to the top--of everything.
- Second, which race is being pushed to the top, or rather, which race is being held down?
All of them, if they are educated in public school.
I’ve never seen anything in the Constitution that entitles the feral government to take command of education.
But some more than others. AA is focused on whites and Asians. Common Core promotes similar liberal values.
Actually, the typical migrant we have here is exactly what I’m talking about. Their skills are way above those of Americans willing to take low-end jobs.
Latin American countries have very little economic freedom because they are very socialist in their structure (thanks to a combination of early 20th century Marxist influences that turned these countries into oligarchies ... Pemex is still a state owned company...and 1960s university Marxist “revolutionaries”). So if they want economic freedom, they come here.
But the reason that Latin Americans are hated by blacks is that even with the language barrier, Latin Americans do better because they have a basic foundation. They can read Spanish, and they learn to read and speak the English they need very quickly because they actually want to make money here. They can also do basic math, which is something I can attest - from personal experience working with lower income kids, both black and white - is something not learned anymore in American schools.
Sounds like you’re speaking of kids from the neighborhood I grew up in. I speak Spanish fluently livius and I can tell you these MFs coming into America don’t have the Democracy you or I believe in. They broke their own country. They are complete sponges and you’d better wake up! Keep dreaming!
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Which is why they claim it's voluntary. Volunteer or lose the money we send you. See. No command.
How about letting parents choose the form of their child’s education?
Modern schooling is babysitting. I can prove it in one sentence.
If you wanted a group of people to assimilate some information, would you assign them to 100 hours in a classroom, or would you tell them that they could advance to the next subject once they demonstrated mastery of the subject, through passing a sequence of tests?
Having worked in several countries in latin america I’ll agree with you that the education is often better. It is infected with a leftist bias, but softened by the overall catholic assumptions. (If leftism undermines catholicism, the reverse is also true...) The kids are smart.
The left bias guarantees that they can’t change the direction of their governments, though.
As you say, the ones who want economic freedom go far and wide looking for it (especially these days) and tend to do well. I work with quite a number of south american exiles and they tend to be our star performers. Technically well prepared and determined to prove it.
Another difference: Here, kids don’t for the most part grow up wanting to study engineering. There, engineering is a prestige job. They have a different self-image.
I don’t see anything wring with common core in math and english. It’s good to know across states which schools have students better able to solve for x in 5x + 2 = 7.
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