Posted on 04/22/2014 11:20:42 AM PDT by xzins
1. The children of this nation belong first to their parents and families, not to their communities or governments. The primary authority over and direction of a child's education lies with that child's parent or guardian.
2. The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) were created without benefit of transparency, by a non-profit organization, with the involvement of very few educators, and majority funded and influenced by corporate interests. Democratic participation, educator input, and opportunity for revision during the "closed door" development of the Standards were utterly lacking. The Standards were introduced and later adopted without benefit of field testing, and multiple members of the Standards validation committee refused to approve them.
3. The CCSS "dumb down" the teaching of America's students by emphasizing "perspectives" and "critical thinking" over content and facts. The CCSS utilize uniform standards that not only eliminate more advanced material from previous teaching curriculums, but also prohibit teachers from teaching students individually and instead promotes a "one size fits all" approach to teaching. CCSS also lower the standards of higher-performing states in order to align educational content and testing to the CCSS.
4. The CCSS Initiative represents a massive and dangerous overreach on the part of the Federal government. The principle of states' rights is outlined in the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which states that any powers not delegated to the federal government are granted to the states. Education is best accomplished when it is left to local communities, parents, teachers, and states. [1]
5. The CCSS Initiative has resulted in, and will continue to result in, an exodus and demoralization of the nation's experienced educators. With the elimination of teacher creativity in content and approach, the CCSS shifted the delivery of education from teachers to technology, with test scores serving as the ultimate standard of educational success. [2]
6. The CCSS will push low-income, minority, and disabled children onto vocational tracks, and will establish a test-based meritocracy. Without the opportunity for individualization of education, and a national disparity of resources from child to child, disadvantaged children will not benefit from either the uniformity of the CCSS, or the renewed emphasis on standardized testing as research shows test scores are heavily influenced by socioeconomic status. [3]
7. The CCSS are costing billions to implement, and the costs will be borne by local school districts. New technology, new teaching materials, increased bandwidth for testing, and teacher training have and will cost taxpayers approximately $15 billion dollars over an anticipated implementation timeline of seven years, and will necessarily defer other education expenditures. [4]
8. The CCSS are developmentally inappropriate for young children. No one with experience in the field of early childhood development was involved in the drafting of the standards, and more than 500 early childhood educators have signed a statement saying the CCSS emphasize academic skills and testing over imaginative play, while requiring children to make sophisticated leaps in reasoning that they are not capable of at young ages. [5] , [6]
9. The CCSS promote an equivalence of worldviews and moral ambiguity that may disrespect the faith, traditions, or upbringing of students. The CCSS promote a progressive, liberal narrative of the world, not only as a result of their being the creation of a massive and centralized educational approach, but also by way of the materials deemed "core-approved," and which are, in the words of the Standards drafters themselves, designed to "broaden worldviews." [7] , [8]
10. The CCSS lack a system of oversight or correction. The CCSS do not answer questions about what to do with students who fail standardized assessments, give no direction as to how to police the division of informational and fictional texts in high school, and make no provision for how to fix problems or revise the standards.
Sarah Perry is an attorney with a degree from the University of Virginia School of Law, where she was on the editorial board of the Virginia Journal of International Law. After six years in private practice where she focused on business litigation, commercial document drafting, and business development, Sarah took on an adjunct professorship, teaching Business Ethics at the Community College of Baltimore County. After the birth of her first child, she transitioned full time to writing. She currently serves as the Common Core Coalition Manager for the Family Research Council.
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[1] Three federal laws are clear that the federal government is to resist involvement in matters of education, such as curriculum, student testing, and the creation of a national student database. The conformity of copyrighted "core approved" materials already distributed by corporations like Pearson Education and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt will necessarily lead to uniformity of curriculum. Uniformity in testing managed by federally-funded consortia Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) and Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) ensures sameness in assessments as well.
[2] Arne Duncan, "Beyond the Bubble Tests: The Next Generation of Assessments -- Secretary Arne Duncan's Remarks to State Leaders at Achieve's American Diploma Project Leadership Team Meeting," U.S. Department of Education, September 2, 2010, accessed April 22, 2014, http://www.ed.gov/news/speeches/beyond-bubble-tests-next-generation-assessments-secretary-arne-duncans-remarks-state-l .
[3] Valerie Strauss, "Everything You Need to Know About Common Core - Ravitch," Washington Post, January 18, 2011, accessed April 22, 2014, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/01/18/everything-you-need-to-know-about-common-core-ravitch/?tid=pm_local_pop .
[4] Perry Chiaramonte, "High Costs of Common Core Has States Rethinking the National Education Standards," Fox News, February 5, 2014, accessed April 22, 2014, http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/02/05/number-states-backing-out-common-core-testing-maryland-schools-low-on-funding/ .
[5] Barry Garelick, "A New Kind of Problem: The Common Core Math Standards," November 20, 2012, accessed April 22, 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/a-new-kind-of-problem-the-common-core-math-standards/265444/ .
[6] Rick Santorum, "The Troubles with Common Core," Townhall.com, April 21, 2014, accessed April 22, 2014, http://townhall.com/columnists/ricksantorum/2014/04/21/the-troubles-with-common-core-n1826204 .
[7] Correlation of Scholastic R.E.A.L. to the Common Core State Standard Initiatives for English Language Arts, Scholastic, accessed April 22, 2014, http://teacher.scholastic.com/products/face-new/pdf/real/realccss.pdf .
[8] English Language Arts Programs, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, accessed April 22, 2014, http://www.hmhco.com/educators/education-topics/by-topic/common-core/ela-programs .
“Corporations” is really a shorthand term, since it’s individuals who are making the decisions. Paying the testing contractor to include product placement in the tests is wrong. Accepting the money and putting in the ads is wrong. They’re blinded by greed or ideology, and would probably look you right in the eye and say they’re doing it for the students’ own good.
It's long past time federal agencies be reminded they are "creatures of Congress," and not mandated by the pen or phone of Obama.
Better yet, the Department of Education should, of course, be eliminated.
Any one of us could, of course, go on and on, tracing the nightmare back to John Dewey, and earlier. Regardless, here we are, in same place our public schools have been for decades, existing more for the sake of public employees, apparently, than for the students, the end of all orthodox institutions, like toll roads that collect money to pay for the maintenance of the toll booths.
The amount spent on Remedial Education at state-funded colleges is measured in the billions. Why does any student graduate from secondary schooling in need of remedial education? Why can't aren't they taught how to balance a checkbook?
Common Core programs the kids to be slaves for Big Government. That PSA on TV with the three lardass "teachers" praising Common Core really pisses me off.
1933 – The Institute for Social Research at Goethe University Frankfurt was comprised of a group of German scholars, mostly Jewish, who developed highly provocative and original perspectives on contemporary society and culture, drawing on Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Weber. They were forced out of Germany by the political rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party and went to Geneva, Switzerland. It then moved to NYC in 1934, where it became affiliated with Columbia University and branched out to Princeton, Brandeis, and California at Berkeley.
Its journal, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, was accordingly renamed Studies in Philosophy and Social Science. It was at that moment that much of its important work began to emerge, having gained a favorable reception within American and English academia. The Frankfurt School is the name usually used to refer to this group of scholars who have been associated at 1 point or another over several decades with the Institute for Social Research of the University of Frankfurt. Many of its scholars studied Marxism from a cultural perspective as the deciding factor in oppression, rather than the economic factors that Karl Marx emphasized. Basically, the Frankfurt School believed that as long as an individual had the belief — or even the hope of belief — that his divine gift of reason could solve the problems facing society, then that society would never reach the state of hopelessness and alienation that they considered necessary to provoke a socialist revolution.
The roots of their thinking go back to classical Marxism, which aimed to incite working class rebellion. The workers refused to rebel, however, and sided with their national governments during World War I. After the war, a number of Marxists decided to revise their dogma. Prominent among them was a group living in Frankfurt, Germany, known as the Frankfurt School, who believed that class struggle was not enough to bring about revolution. What was necessary was cultural Marxism that would attack the key pillars of Western Civilization: religion, patriotism, and family life. They called this attack on Western identity and culture “critical theory,” and members of the Frankfurt School brought this theory to the U.S.
Cultural Marxism refers to a school or offshoot of Marxism that analyses culture as the deciding factor in posited oppression, rather than the economic factors that Karl Marx emphasized. An outgrowth of Western Marxism (especially Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School) and finding popularity in the 1960s as cultural studies, Cultural Marxism argues that oppressive power structures exist within traditional cultural artifacts of Western society like capitalism, nationalism, the nuclear family, gender, race, or cultural identity; and that the goal of Cultural Marxism is to use Marx's methods (e.g., dialectic materialism) within academia to expose and challenge such "capitalist hegemony".
To further the advance of their “quiet” cultural revolution, the Frankfurt School made the following 12 recommendations — all of them calculated to undermine the foundations of society and create the dystopia we now see all around us:
The creation of racism offences and hate speech laws.
Continual change to create confusion (e,g., in school curricula).
Masturbation propaganda in schools, combined with the homosexualization of children and their corruption by exposing them to child porn in the classroom.
The systematic undermining of parental and teachers’ authority.
Huge immigration to destroy national identity and foment future race wars.
The systematic promotion of excessive drinking and recreational drugs.
The systematic promotion of sexual deviance in society.
An unreliable legal system with bias against the victims of crime.
Dependency on state benefits.
Control and dumbing down of media.
Encouraging the breakdown of the family.
All all-out attack on Christianity and the emptying of churches.
Common Core Roots Lie in Ties Between Barack Obama, Bill Ayers
In an article published on 12/02/2013 that advocates for Common Core standards, the Associated Press presents what amounts to the typical talking points for supporters when faced with criticism that Common Core is a federal takeover of education.
The standards were created by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers to improve academic achievement and increase accountability. President Barack Obama and his administration embraced them.
Actually, Barack Obama did not simply “embrace” a concept that others developed; instead, the very roots of Common Core are in the early ideas generated by him and his fellow radical community organizer, Bill Ayers. Just prior to the presidential election of 2008, Dr. Stanley Kurtz, Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, wrote an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal in which he observed that then-Democrat presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama’s “most important executive experience” was heading up the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), an education foundation that was the invention of Bill Ayers, founder of the Weather Underground in the 1960s.
Obama led the CAC from 1995 to 1999 and remained on the board until 2001. The foundation funneled more than $100 million into community organizations and radical education activists. The CAC’s stated purpose was to improve Chicago’s public schools using funding from an education initiative by Walter Annenberg. As chairman, Obama handled fiscal matters while Ayers co-chaired the CAC’s other key entity, the “Collaborative,” which influenced education policy. Archives from the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois at Chicago showed that Obama and Ayers worked as a team to advance the CAC agenda.
In his op-ed, Kurtz explained that the Obama campaign at the time said that Ayers had nothing to do with Obama’s “recruitment” to CAC’s board. However, as Kurtz discovered, the Daley archives showed that: …
…along with [Deborah] Leff and [Patricia Albjerg] Graham, Mr. Ayers was one of a working group of five who assembled the initial board in 1994. Mr. Ayers founded CAC and was its guiding spirit. No one would have been appointed the CAC chairman without his approval.
Kurtz continued that the CAC’s agenda channeled Ayers’ educational philosophy “which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism.” Ayers wrote that teachers should act as community organizers whose focus is provoking resistance to American racism and oppression.
“I’m a radical, Leftist, small ‘c’ communist,” Ayers said in an interview in Ron Chepesiuk’s Sixties Radicals. …
What? You don’t think a gender studies major would be able to earn you a decent living? Of course it would....in the Obama administration where you’re not sure of the sex of the politicians until you check under the hood..../s
The Crocodile Dundee scene came to mind....
OK, thanks!
It’s too bad Reagan never got around to eliminating the Dept. Of Education.
We don't have Common Core in TX, so it's good to hear from others about its content.
I saw some math questions and was dumfounded why using base-10 math is harder than drawing arcs between repeating 1 thru 0, then counting the arcs and semi-arcs to achieve subtraction. The zero is at the top of my list of most significant inventions in human history! Why convolute perfection?
Reagan never had the entire Congress. He had the Senate for 6 years but never had the House.
He would not have been able to end the department of education.
I got the scoop from her. She said this is the first year that kids are expected to learn to read, and at a level c level. Where in the past they could focus on letters and sounds, but also how to stand in line, speak when spoken to. Also they can now fail kindergarten, it used to be the parents discretion if they were heard back our not
Common Core = HARD CORE!!
Do they teach using phonics at all? I guess the ones who don’t learn their letters at home are at a disadvantage.
:(
Research shows Strategies that work in science, math by Rhonda Rosenberg | April 17, 2014 New York Teacher
New research examining the impact of different classroom instructional practices on student achievement in math and science found that learning gains were greatest in math when calculators, computers and other technology were integrated in the class and in science when the student completed a science experiment or project in class. The second most effective practice in both subjects was the traditional classroom approach where the teacher lectures and the students listen and take notes. Also effective was having students work together in groups to solve math or science problems. [also called LAB? -- my own take]
The study, published in the American Journal of Education, used standardized math and science test score data from middle school students in North Carolina. Included on North Carolina’s tests are survey questions that ask students about the kind of instructional activities they encountered in their classrooms, which allowed researchers Michael Hansen and Thomas Gonzalez, both of the American Institutes for Research, to look for correlations.
The researchers found that less effective practices in math included having students explain their answers in class; read about math; and talk about how math is used in other subjects. For science, the less effective practices were having students read about science or complete a science project outside the classroom. [i.e., COMMIE CORE CRAP] These results held for students of all income levels and all races and ethnicities.
The researchers recommended that educators try to integrate the most effective instructional practices in their classrooms. They also noted that some of the practices that did not appear to help raise test scores could nevertheless be useful in stimulating student interest in math and science.
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I think there’s a vested interest in keeping math and science scores low compared to other countries.
Whatever any other reasons might be, one thing it does is justify immigration of tech level immigrants.
The replacing of the middle class with those accustomed to socialist government?
My wife, a math teacher hates it
I teach Resource (which means we give one on one or small group help in grades K-5) and I hate it.....for every grade. It is totally confusing to kids that need extra help or have learning processing problems.
In a recent common core math “test” to determine annual progress, a geometry class wasn’t asked a single geometry question.
The only reason I could come up with for these kinds of questions is, since this was a trial test for us (we are just instituting CC), they want to make it appear how "lacking" our current program is.
I think there is an interest in making American kids appear dumb in math and science
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