Posted on 11/17/2013 5:50:33 AM PST by kristinn
(Update: Adding more on opposition to Core, where Duncan spoke)
U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan told a group of state schools superintendents Friday that he found it “fascinating” that some of the opposition to the Common Core State Standards has come from “white suburban moms who — all of a sudden — their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were.”
Yes, he really said that. But he has said similar things before. What, exactly, is he talking about?
In his cheerleading for the controversial Common Core State Standards — which were approved by 45 states and the District of Columbia and are now being implemented across the country (though some states are reconsidering) — Duncan has repeatedly noted that the standards and the standardized testing that goes along with them are more difficult than students in most states have confronted.
The Core was designed to elevate teaching and learning. Supporters say it does that; critics say it doesn’t and that some of the standards, especially for young children, are not developmentally appropriate. Whichever side you fall on regarding the Core’s academic value, there is no question that their implementation in many areas has been miserable — so miserable that American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, a Core supporter, recently compared it to another particularly troubled rollout:
You think the Obamacare implementation is bad? The implementation of the Common Core is far worse.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
I took a little different approach when my son was going thru local public school, which I’d always considered better than most anyway. I “rode herd” on the teachers, the admins, the school board all the years he was in it. I read the textbooks, I went to the meetings, and I always helped with homework and straightened out the miscellaneous stuff that goes sideways. I took the lead in recalling a school board that was going crooked and 20 years later I still keep my eye on them to make sure the kids are getting a fair deal. There were some early retirements because some staffers came to realize they were going to have to step up their game. My sons teachers learned to fear teaching something wrong or even weakly because I never allowed it to stand. As time went by I had a great deal of support among other parents who also wanted a good education for their students.
That’s the difference-—not just whining and bellyaching. Being specific, doing the homework to make the complaint legitimate, and slugging the desk of the responsible guy to make sure he’s looking at you when you tell him what the problem is. Been there. Done that. SEMPER FI
I cannot disagree with that in any way.
I know I’ll have to teach them everything at home as best I can.
If you do a good job of this, I suspect your kids will do well and won't succumb to indoctrination. I believe you are correct in using this "on the job training" to empower your kids to discern liars, and hidden motivation in society.
Best of luck to you and God Bless you all.
It was a long decision in the making. I went to home schooling conferences after they were born. I understand and admire the people who do it. In the end, I felt so much of who I am today is a result of watching other people. I want them to have that same experience.
God be with you as well.
However, it is likely that overall, you achieved a better result.
Your child's schoolmates received a better education, and higher quality professionals were introduced and kept in the system.
Out of curiosity, can you assess the political/philosophical attitude of the population of the district, and the years involved?
Is it my imagination or does he look like a twin brother of Janet Napolitano?
If you look into the eyes of any in this administration, they all seem to be possessed. I see the same in images of those who were Hitler’s henchmen. Thought it was just me...
I don’t think you’re alone ;-)
And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!
Solzhenitsyn
“How is that people who have been crushed by the sheer weight of slavery and cast to the bottom of the pit can nevertheless find the strength to rise up and free themselves, first in spirit and then in body; while those who soar unhampered over the peaks of freedom suddenly lose the taste for freedom, lose the will to defend it, and, hopelessly confused and lost, almost begin to crave slavery”. Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
Arne Duncan grew up in Hyde Park... I can almost hear him saying ‘white suburban moms live in houses made of ticky tacky...’ There aren’t many groups Hyde Parkers look down on more than ‘white suburban moms’.
The Catholic schools are full of liberal idiots. The Christian schools are oppressive and don’t trust the kids.
...what in the world do you mean by that...?
Doesn’t anybody question by what right the fedearl government is involved in education at all?
I appologize. I must have confused him with someone else. Heck it’s hard to keep track.
Obama’s goons are clearly feeling very empowered.
Arne Duncan is a classic pseudo-black white Marxist. This came on way back in the 60s and 70s, which are Obama’s decades, because he was a child living outside of our country and in a weird time-warp with his dysfunctional mother.
In school, we all had to read works by people such as Franz Fanon, the big “anti-colonialist,” which encouraged all French intellectuals or anybody influenced by them to go off and declare violent, homicidal, Marxist homosexual prisoners to be the only trustworthy and true-speaking people in the society.
I don’t know a thing about Hyde Park, Chicago, but I can sure tell you what you need to know about NYC (especially the Upper West Side) when I was growing up at about the same time.
I must have him confused with someone else. I appologize.
Arne Duncan: White suburban moms’ upset that Common Core shows their kids aren’t ‘brilliant’
Sounds like a war on women to me. Soccer moms on my Facebook feed are mighty po’d about this.
I am a conservative Catholic so before you get all torqued up, the Catholic schools have some good people, conservative, but lots and lots of Democrats, just like the Catholic church does. The Catholic girls’ school here also has a huge alcohol problem with the girls known for being boozy, what gives? I was visiting my sis at a hospital and this female with a hat and jewelry on came up to my mom and it became apparent she was some version of nun! I had nuns of St. Joseph in black habits who wouldn’t have dreamed of looking as floozie at that nun did, it was galling.
The private school my kid attends treats them like adults, they can go off campus for lunch, they have study halls etc. When the atheists were getting annoying, we looked at the Christian school, but the attitude there was that the kids couldn’t be trusted to do the right thing and had to be watched all the time, no study halls, couldn’t leave campus. Sigh, it’s hard to find the perfect place, that is what I mean by that.
Romney won married white woman.
That’s what this is about.
It’s REVENGE time.
Race to the top was the carrot they dangled in front of cash strapped states as a bribe.
Here are your RTTT dollars - with the understanding you will adopt Commie Core standards - the details of which were withheld at the time
It appears to bt 3rd world math. Appropriate for the upcoming generations in the fundamentally transformed America.
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