Author Topic: Common Core is the dynamite that could blow up Jeb Bush's presidential ambitions By Hugh Hewitt  (Read 1307 times)

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http://washingtonexaminer.com/article/2545345

Common Core is the dynamite that could blow up Jeb Bush's presidential ambitions
By Hugh Hewitt | MARCH 9, 2014 AT 4:09 PM



The Conservative Political Action Conference has come and gone for 2014, and Sen. Rand Paul won the straw ballot which is held every time the party gets started.

Paul, R-Ky., racked up 31 percent support among the partiers, and the CPAC gang is indeed prone to party.

Sen. Ted Cruz , R-Texas, came in second with 11 percent of the CPAC thumbs-ups, and he will now head west to woo the very serious folks of the Claremont Institute's Churchill Dinner on Saturday night in Beverly Hills.

Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., is headed to Cedar Rapids on April 11 for Iowa's annual Lincoln Dinner, and Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., is fresh from a star turn on the realities of life in Cuba -- a tutorial for tottering Tom Harkin, Iowa's ancient senator who still nurses a flame for Castro's remade society -- and Ukraine-congress-action/">an op-ed co-authored with Rep. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., on Ukraine, which paired two of the GOP's most serious voices.


Everyone is busy, busy, busy, laying groundwork. Except Jeb Bush, Florida's former governor and first brother.

Where in the world is Jeb? Figuring out, I think, what to do about Common Core.

Last week I interviewed George Will about many things, but specifically about Jeb and Common Core. It is worth reproducing the entire exchange with one of the country's most respected commentators:

HH: Do you look at Jeb Bush and see someone who can carry that banner, or someone who’s crippled by the name?

GW: Both. I think he has admitted that the name is a handicap because the Bush brand has been damaged. On the other hand, he's a terrifically talented man who was a governor of a very complicated state, and who as governor devoted a disproportionate share of his time to an extremely important matter, and that is education, grades K-12, which if it fails, everything fails in this country. So he certainly ought to be in the mix.

HH: Have you paid much attention to the Common Core controversy which has got him by the ankles?

GW: I have paid attention to it. I think he’s mistaken. I understand the Common Core people. I know it’s worrying them. They’re right to be worried about the mediocrity of our education. I happen to think, however, that it’s just the thin end of an enormous federal wedge and a terrible mistake.

HH: So what’s your advice to Jeb about that?

GW: Tiptoe away from it. Scott Walker improvidently and early sort-of embraced it, and I think he's tiptoeing at the moment. You know, when Ronald Reagan convened in 1983 the famous study [A] Nation At Risk …

HH: Yes.

GW: ... it contained a wonderful sentence that’s worth recalling. He said if any foreign power imposed upon us the educational mediocrity we have imposed on ourselves, we would consider it an act of war. So the advocates of the Common Core and we who oppose it are united in understanding we’ve got a problem.

HH: If it is understood as a floor and not a ceiling, and power over it is genuinely local as opposed to federalized, does it then, can it be rebranded and retooled?

GW: I’m skeptical, because I don’t think it can be kept local. And I don’t think it can be kept minimal for two reasons. They say it’s not a curriculum. Well, standards breed the alignment of tests with it, and the alignment of the SAT and the ACT tests. And that in turn requires curricula to be aligned. So you add that to the simple metabolic urge of the Washington bureaucracy to extend its control, and you have dynamite.

The dynamite that is under the presidential ambitions of Jeb Bush. He needs to defuse it, or declare he won't be running. And soon.
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Why this fetish for having school standards be strictly local?  It makes no sense whatsoever.  I can certainly see leaving it to localities to exceed a certain minimum set of standards, but I see no reason why there shouldn't be a uniform (which is distinct from federal) set of minimum standards applicable to all schools.

Offline Rapunzel

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Why this fetish for having school standards be strictly local?  It makes no sense whatsoever.  I can certainly see leaving it to localities to exceed a certain minimum set of standards, but I see no reason why there shouldn't be a uniform (which is distinct from federal) set of minimum standards applicable to all schools.

Jeb Bush is going to be hit very hard over Common Core should he decide to run for office.

A few things - some of them obvious.

Claims that Common Core bubbled up from the states are incorrect.   A nonprofit group called “Achieve Inc.” stocked with federal-standards advocates who’ve been around since the Clinton years, designed the materials. The National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) subsidized by the Gates Foundation rubber-stamped them.

The Federal Government's job is defense of the nation and borders, not education.

Until Jimmy Carter we did not have a Federal Department of Education."  JMHO it needs to be abolished.

The 10th amendment giving states rights - that includes setting their own education standards

In the past schools around the nation have been laboratories of innovation and then other schools have drawn from their successes and learned from their failures.

Common Core is setting a standard for mediocrity... the brightest students are being brought down to the medium and the under-performing are either going to move to the middle or will drop out and be totally lost.

 
http://michellemalkin.com/2013/09/20/jeb-bushs-latest-common-core-snit-fit/

 Christopher Tienken of Seton Hall University notes that much of the “evidence” and “empirical research” that the Common Core crowd cites comes from … the Common Core crowd. “When I reviewed that ‘large and growing body of knowledge,’” Tienken reported, “I found that it was not large, and in fact built mostly on one report, Benchmarking for Success, created by the NGA (National Governors Association) and the CCSSO (Council of Chief State School Officers), the same groups that created these standards.

 Stanford University professor James Milgram , a prominent dissenting member of the Common Core math standards committee, has exposed how the muddled standards would leave American students at least two years behind the rest of the planet.

University of Arkansas education professor emeritus and Massachusetts school standards architect Sandra Stotsky, who sat on the language arts validation panel, has documented how the English standards will result in:

Quote
1) teachers spending at least 50 percent of their reading instruction time on “informational texts” at every grade level.

2) reduced emphasis on analytical skills involving complex literary works.

3) a depleted fund of content knowledge that will leave students unprepared for basic college coursework.

Both Stotsky and Milgram repeatedly asked their panel colleagues for the names of the countries the Common Core standards were allegedly “benchmarked” to, but they never received an answer.

 Dr. Bill Evers of the Hoover Institution succinctly debunked Bush’s repeated insistence that 45 states voluntarily adopted the irresistibly rigorous standards:

For insistence - that 45 states voluntarily adopted the irresistibly rigorous standards:

“(S)tates weren’t leaping because they couldn’t resist the Core’s academic magnetism. They were leaping because it was the Great Recession — and the Obama administration was dangling a $4.35 billion Race to the Top carrot in front of them. Big points in that federal program were awarded for adopting the Core, so, with little public debate, most did.”

Can you spell b-o-o-n-d-o-g-g-l-e? Remember: Bush’s educational foundation, the Foundation for Excellence in Education, is tied at the hip to the federally funded testing consortium called PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers), which raked in $186 million through Race to the Top to develop nationalized tests “aligned” to the top-down Common Core program.

One of the Bush foundation’s behemoth corporate sponsors is Pearson, the multi-billion-dollar educational publishing and testing conglomerate. Pearson snagged $23 million in contracts to design the first wave of PARCC test items. The company holds a $250 million contract with Florida to design and publish its state tests. Pearson designed New York’s Common Core-aligned assessments and is also the exclusive contractor for Texas state tests.

And in Los Angeles this summer, Pearson sealed a whopping $30 million taxpayer-subsidized deal to supply the city’s schools with 45,000 iPads pre-loaded with Pearson Common Core curriculum apps. That’s $678 per iPad, $200 more than the standard cost, with scant evidence that any of this shiny edu-tech will do anything to improve the achievement bottom line.

As with all political posers who grab power under the guise of doing it “for the children,” don’t read their lips. Follow the money.


++++++++++++++++++++++

http://michellemalkin.com/2013/01/25/rotten-to-the-core-part-2-readin-writin-and-deconstructionism/

English professor Mary Grabar describes Common Core training exercises that tell teachers “to read Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address without emotion and without providing any historical context. Common Core reduces all ‘texts’ to one level: the Gettysburg Address to the EPA’s Recommended Levels of Insulation.” Indeed, in my own research, I found one Common Core “exemplar” on teaching the Gettysburg Address that instructs educators to “refrain from giving background context or substantial instructional guidance at the outset.”

Another exercise devised by Common Core promoters features the Gettysburg Address as a word cloud. Yes, a word cloud. Teachers use the jumble of letters, devoid of historical context and truths, to help students chart, decode and “deconstruct” Lincoln’s speech.

Deconstructionism, of course, is the faddish leftwing school of thought popularized by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in the 1970s. Writer Robert Locke described the nihilistic movement best: “It is based on the proposition that the apparently real world is in fact a vast social construct and that the way to knowledge lies in taking apart in one’s mind this thing society has built. Taken to its logical conclusion, it supposes that there is at the end of the day no actual reality, just a series of appearances stitched together by social constructs into what we all agree to call reality.”

Literature and history are all about competing ideological narratives, in other words. One story or “text” is no better than another. Common Core’s literature-lite literacy standards are aimed not at increasing “college readiness” or raising academic expectations. Just the opposite. They help pave the way for more creeping political indoctrination under the guise of increasing access to “information.”

As University of Arkansas professor Sandra Stotsky, an unrelenting whistleblower who witnessed the Common Core sausage-making process firsthand, concluded: “An English curriculum overloaded with advocacy journalism or with ‘informational’ articles chosen for their topical and/or political nature should raise serious concerns among parents, school leaders, and policymakers. Common Core’s standards not only present a serious threat to state and local education authority, but also put academic quality at risk. Pushing fatally flawed education standards into America’s schools is not the way to improve education for America’s students.”

Bipartisan Common Core defenders claim their standards are merely “recommendations.” But the standards, “rubrics” and “exemplars” are tied to tests and textbooks. The textbooks and tests are tied to money and power. Federally funded and federally championed nationalized standards lead inexorably to de facto mandates. Any way you slice it, dice it or word-cloud it, Common Core is a mandate for mediocrity.

�The time is now near at hand which must probably determine, whether Americans are to be, Freemen, or Slaves.� G Washington July 2, 1776

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http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2014/03/03/does-jeb-bush-realize-common-core-threatens-school-choice-concept/

Does Jeb Bush realize Common Core threatens school choice concept?

By Ben Velderman
Published March 03, 2014
FoxNews.com

Editor's note: The following column by Ben Velderman's column originally appeared on EAGnews.com, the website of the Education Action Group.

When future scholars write the history of the school choice movement, Jeb Bush will be remembered as one of its founding fathers.

Bush was a charter school advocate years before most Americans had even heard about the alternative public schools. Through the work of Bush and other leaders, there are more than 5,200 charter schools in the U.S. that serve an estimated 1.7 million students. The schools can be found in 41 states, including Florida, where Bush helped establish the very first charter back in 1996.

Over the years, Bush has courageously thrown his support behind various school voucher plans and parent trigger laws – both as governor of Florida and as a private citizen – all with the goal of helping families escape the K-12 public school monopoly.

 
Quote
  Jeb Bush is jeopardizing 20 years’ worth of hard-won school choice successes by stubbornly promoting and defending the Common Core math and English learning standards.

And to benefit those students who stay in the traditional system, Bush has been a champion for tougher teacher evaluations and merit pay plans to ensure that government-run schools are being staffed by the best individuals possible.

Bush’s service to the causes of school choice and improving public education has benefited an untold number of families, and for that he deserves the thanks of a grateful nation.

Quote
However … Bush is jeopardizing 20 years’ worth of hard-won school choice successes by stubbornly promoting and defending the Common Core math and English learning standards. He doesn’t seem to realize that the one-size-fits-all standards are likely to have the practical effect of making instruction in all types of schools – public, public charter, private and even home schools – depressingly similar and mediocre.

The non-traditional schools will be forced to be less creative in their approach to learning, and will therefore have less value to the public.

A high price to pay

Despite a lack of tangible evidence, Bush and other Common Core supporters are adamant that Common Core will represent a huge upgrade over the ragtag group of learning standards states have been using for years.

They’re also convinced Common Core will lead to more “rigorous” instruction, which will produce high school graduates with better “critical thinking” skills. Those better-prepared graduates, the theory goes, will boost the struggling American economy.

That’s the main selling point Bush and company use to sell Common Core to the skeptical masses.

Common Core supporters spend much less time talking about the other, larger goal of the nationalized learning standards, which is to create a uniform K-12 system that synchronizes grade-level instruction among the states.

The idea is that Common Core-aligned standardized tests will generate apples-to-apples student data that will allow education “experts” to crack the “science” behind student learning and improve teacher training programs. The student data bonanza will also allow K-12 technology companies to create software and programs that “personalize” the learning process for students.

According to this theory, public education is just a few years away from historic possibilities that could finally restore America’s K-12 greatness.

The problem is it’s just a long-shot theory. Common Core has never been field tested anywhere in the country, so the overall academic results are anyone’s guess.

Meanwhile, implementation of the standards throughout the nation has not gone well. Teachers don’t understand much of the material, so students have little chance of grasping it. Standardized test scores have dropped significantly in early Common Core states. Millions of concerned people, including teachers, union officials, school administrators and parents have become highly critical of Common Core over the past year or two, and numerous state legislatures are debating the idea of dumping the standards altogether.

Bush has already paid the price politically for his stubborn support of Common Core. Many conservative Republicans – the voters who make or break GOP presidential candidates in the state primaries – despise Common Core and mistrust those who support it.

As writer James Pethokoukis put it last summer, “In a startling turnabout, an education record that has looked to be an unvarnished plus for Bush may now be a liability. Long viewed as a potential contender in the 2016 presidential race, Bush has taken considerable heat from activists on the right in recent months for his support of the Common Core.

Quote
“Several of his potential rivals for a GOP nomination, among them Senators Marco Rubio and Rand Paul, have outflanked him by coming out against the Common Core, which many Tea Party activists see as a heavy-handed federal intrusion into local control of education.”

And even if Common Core were to prove ultimately successful, it will come at a huge cost.

Not only will the long-held American principles of locally controlled schools and privacy rights for students be seriously compromised, but it will render school choice – the focus of much of Bush’s life’s work – virtually meaningless.

Creating carbon copy schools

We have to wonder how Bush would respond to various experts who convincingly predict that Common Core will have the effect of stealing away the unique qualities that make many charter and private schools so different and special.

Quote
Hillsdale College professor Terrence Moore argues the Common Core could conceivably lead to the creation of fewer “classical” charter schools – those steeped in the classics of Western thought – throughout the U.S.

Quote
In an interview with Heartland.org, Moore said unique, “classical” based charter and voucher schools –many of which produce amazing results with students – may not be allowed to open by state or school district officials because their curricula don’t mesh with Common Core’s emphasis on post-modern literature and “informational” texts.

Moore also warned existing classical schools might become so consumed with trying to meet the expectations of the Common Core-aligned state assessments that they might have to “stop what they’re doing and have to teach to the test in order to prepare students.”

That would “gut their curriculum, especially knowing that so many principals are very skittish about test scores (and) what they have to do to prepare for the tests,” Moore added.

That reality is already settling in for at least one charter school leader.

Principal Derek Anderson said Common Core poses an “existential” threat for Ridgeview Classical Schools in Fort Collins, Colorado.


“PARCC (a Common Core-aligned test) is truly the enforcement mechanism that will coerce schools into adopting the Common Core curriculum,” Anderson wrote in an email to conservative columnist Michelle Malkin. “We cannot do this. It is entirely against the mission and philosophy of our school.”

To our knowledge, Bush has not addressed any of these concerns. Bush has declined our requests for interviews.

Schools will be pressured to cooperate

The Common Core infection seems likely spread to private voucher schools, too. Here’s how Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post explained it in a 2013 article:
Quote

“Students in every state take the high-stakes college admissions exams, the SAT and the ACT, as well as the newly designed GED, the high school equivalency test used as an alternative way to get a high school diploma. And all of those exams are going to be aligned to the Common Core standards, at least that is what their respective owners say.”

Deduced Strauss: “It turns out that the standards could wind up affecting students in every state — even if their legislatures reject the initiative.”

The unavoidable effect of Common Core on all types of schools is obvious: Any institution worth its salt will do whatever is necessary to help students continue their education at a college or university. And according to the new rules of the game, that means making students fluent in Common Core, if for no other reason than to pass the ACT and SAT tests.

And on the off-chance that some officials at private or charter schools don’t care about that, they will still have a very tough time finding textbooks and instructional materials that haven’t been designed to comply with the dictates of Common Core.

The bottom line is this: Jeb Bush has spent a career extolling the right of families to send their children to the school that best meets their needs.

But, logically speaking, how does choosing their child’s school benefit parents if all the schools are teaching the same concepts at the same pace, and – thanks to the “hammer” of Common Core testing – essentially the same lesson plans and learning materials?

What’s the point?

In a Human Events editorial published last fall, Bush maintained that Common Core doesn’t “harm parental choices.”

We suppose that’s true. You can’t harm something that no longer exists.

Looks like Bush is still in denial that his zeal for Common Core could turn his life’s work into ashes.

Ben Velderman is a communications specialist for EAG and joined in 2010. He is a former member of the Michigan Education Association.
�The time is now near at hand which must probably determine, whether Americans are to be, Freemen, or Slaves.� G Washington July 2, 1776

Offline Rapunzel

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Quote
In an interview with Heartland.org, Moore said unique, “classical” based charter and voucher schools –many of which produce amazing results with students – may not be allowed to open by state or school district officials because their curricula don’t mesh with Common Core’s emphasis on post-modern literature and “informational” texts.

And I watched a report this afternoon with a professor who stated the recent changes is the SAT are to do just this - force charter schools and homeschooling into Common Core whether they want to teach it or not teach it...
�The time is now near at hand which must probably determine, whether Americans are to be, Freemen, or Slaves.� G Washington July 2, 1776

Offline Rapunzel

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http://www.politico.com/blogs/politico-live/2013/10/bush-breaks-with-rubio-on-common-core-175500.html

Bush breaks with Rubio on Common Core

By KEVIN ROBILLARD |
10/20/13 10:56 AM EDT

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush is gently breaking with his one-time protege, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, over the Common Core education standards that have been adopted by dozens of states.

In July, Rubio said President Barack Obama was using Common Core to turn the Education Department into a "national school board." Bush Bush, the most high-profile GOP backer of Common Core, dismissed that.

"Based on the facts as I know them, that's not accurate," the former Republican governor said in an interview aired Sunday on ABC's "This Week." "Marco's concerned about a national curriculum and I am as well. There's a big fear on the right about this massive government overreach; I totally appreciate that.  But that's not what this is. This is a national imperative. It's not a federal government program. But we could just, you know, comfortably go in decline if we accept the notion that only a third of our kids are college- or career-ready, even though we spend more per student than any country in the world."

Common Core, while backed by the Obama administration, is a creation of the National Governors' Association and a national group of state education officers.
�The time is now near at hand which must probably determine, whether Americans are to be, Freemen, or Slaves.� G Washington July 2, 1776

Oceander

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Jeb Bush is going to be hit very hard over Common Core should he decide to run for office.

A few things - some of them obvious.

Claims that Common Core bubbled up from the states are incorrect.   A nonprofit group called “Achieve Inc.” stocked with federal-standards advocates who’ve been around since the Clinton years, designed the materials. The National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) subsidized by the Gates Foundation rubber-stamped them.

The Federal Government's job is defense of the nation and borders, not education.

Until Jimmy Carter we did not have a Federal Department of Education."  JMHO it needs to be abolished.

The 10th amendment giving states rights - that includes setting their own education standards

In the past schools around the nation have been laboratories of innovation and then other schools have drawn from their successes and learned from their failures.

Common Core is setting a standard for mediocrity... the brightest students are being brought down to the medium and the under-performing are either going to move to the middle or will drop out and be totally lost.

 
http://michellemalkin.com/2013/09/20/jeb-bushs-latest-common-core-snit-fit/

 Christopher Tienken of Seton Hall University notes that much of the “evidence” and “empirical research” that the Common Core crowd cites comes from … the Common Core crowd. “When I reviewed that ‘large and growing body of knowledge,’” Tienken reported, “I found that it was not large, and in fact built mostly on one report, Benchmarking for Success, created by the NGA (National Governors Association) and the CCSSO (Council of Chief State School Officers), the same groups that created these standards.

 Stanford University professor James Milgram , a prominent dissenting member of the Common Core math standards committee, has exposed how the muddled standards would leave American students at least two years behind the rest of the planet.

University of Arkansas education professor emeritus and Massachusetts school standards architect Sandra Stotsky, who sat on the language arts validation panel, has documented how the English standards will result in:

 Dr. Bill Evers of the Hoover Institution succinctly debunked Bush’s repeated insistence that 45 states voluntarily adopted the irresistibly rigorous standards:

For insistence - that 45 states voluntarily adopted the irresistibly rigorous standards:

“(S)tates weren’t leaping because they couldn’t resist the Core’s academic magnetism. They were leaping because it was the Great Recession — and the Obama administration was dangling a $4.35 billion Race to the Top carrot in front of them. Big points in that federal program were awarded for adopting the Core, so, with little public debate, most did.”

Can you spell b-o-o-n-d-o-g-g-l-e? Remember: Bush’s educational foundation, the Foundation for Excellence in Education, is tied at the hip to the federally funded testing consortium called PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers), which raked in $186 million through Race to the Top to develop nationalized tests “aligned” to the top-down Common Core program.

One of the Bush foundation’s behemoth corporate sponsors is Pearson, the multi-billion-dollar educational publishing and testing conglomerate. Pearson snagged $23 million in contracts to design the first wave of PARCC test items. The company holds a $250 million contract with Florida to design and publish its state tests. Pearson designed New York’s Common Core-aligned assessments and is also the exclusive contractor for Texas state tests.

And in Los Angeles this summer, Pearson sealed a whopping $30 million taxpayer-subsidized deal to supply the city’s schools with 45,000 iPads pre-loaded with Pearson Common Core curriculum apps. That’s $678 per iPad, $200 more than the standard cost, with scant evidence that any of this shiny edu-tech will do anything to improve the achievement bottom line.

As with all political posers who grab power under the guise of doing it “for the children,” don’t read their lips. Follow the money.


++++++++++++++++++++++

http://michellemalkin.com/2013/01/25/rotten-to-the-core-part-2-readin-writin-and-deconstructionism/

English professor Mary Grabar describes Common Core training exercises that tell teachers “to read Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address without emotion and without providing any historical context. Common Core reduces all ‘texts’ to one level: the Gettysburg Address to the EPA’s Recommended Levels of Insulation.” Indeed, in my own research, I found one Common Core “exemplar” on teaching the Gettysburg Address that instructs educators to “refrain from giving background context or substantial instructional guidance at the outset.”

Another exercise devised by Common Core promoters features the Gettysburg Address as a word cloud. Yes, a word cloud. Teachers use the jumble of letters, devoid of historical context and truths, to help students chart, decode and “deconstruct” Lincoln’s speech.

Deconstructionism, of course, is the faddish leftwing school of thought popularized by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in the 1970s. Writer Robert Locke described the nihilistic movement best: “It is based on the proposition that the apparently real world is in fact a vast social construct and that the way to knowledge lies in taking apart in one’s mind this thing society has built. Taken to its logical conclusion, it supposes that there is at the end of the day no actual reality, just a series of appearances stitched together by social constructs into what we all agree to call reality.”

Literature and history are all about competing ideological narratives, in other words. One story or “text” is no better than another. Common Core’s literature-lite literacy standards are aimed not at increasing “college readiness” or raising academic expectations. Just the opposite. They help pave the way for more creeping political indoctrination under the guise of increasing access to “information.”

As University of Arkansas professor Sandra Stotsky, an unrelenting whistleblower who witnessed the Common Core sausage-making process firsthand, concluded: “An English curriculum overloaded with advocacy journalism or with ‘informational’ articles chosen for their topical and/or political nature should raise serious concerns among parents, school leaders, and policymakers. Common Core’s standards not only present a serious threat to state and local education authority, but also put academic quality at risk. Pushing fatally flawed education standards into America’s schools is not the way to improve education for America’s students.”

Bipartisan Common Core defenders claim their standards are merely “recommendations.” But the standards, “rubrics” and “exemplars” are tied to tests and textbooks. The textbooks and tests are tied to money and power. Federally funded and federally championed nationalized standards lead inexorably to de facto mandates. Any way you slice it, dice it or word-cloud it, Common Core is a mandate for mediocrity.



Slow down.  Let's take it from basics.  A very simple question:  why should educational standards be solely local?  Has nothing to do with common (sense) core or any other set of standards right now, just a very fundamental question.

Oceander

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And I watched a report this afternoon with a professor who stated the recent changes is the SAT are to do just this - force charter schools and homeschooling into Common Core whether they want to teach it or not teach it...

Well, homeschoolers have to meet some set of standards, don't they?  Or can anyone with a kid just say they're homeschooling even if they don't actually teach the kid anything?

If homeschoolers must meet some set of standards right now, then they are just as much "forced" to teach those standards as any other standards.

Oceander

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I'll just say one thing on this supposedly procrustean aspect of Common Core:  it just ain't so.  Case in point: the catholic school my daughter attended in NYC up through 3d grade.  Now that my daughter is being exposed to Common Core this year and is not have significant trouble with it, I can see that the prior school was, in fact, already teaching at, or above, the Common Core standards.  Ergo, no procrustes.

Offline Gazoo

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Common Core, while backed by the Obama administration, is a creation of the National Governors' Association and a national group of state education officers.

Remember when they blamed F&F on W. Bush? After Obama's Arne Duncan radicals were placed; common core turned into common liberal mish mash.

Either Jeb is backing the progressive push of CC education or he is unaware Duncan corrupted Common Core.
"The Tea Party has a right to feel cheated.

When does the Republican Party, put in the majority by the Tea Party, plan to honor its commitment to halt the growth of the Federal monolith and bring the budget back into balance"?

Oceander

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Remember when they blamed F&F on W. Bush? After Obama's Arne Duncan radicals were placed; common core turned into common liberal mish mash.

Either Jeb is backing the progressive push of CC education or he is unaware Duncan corrupted Common Core.

I see plenty more liberal mish mash in the old  NYS standards than I do in the new NYS Common Core standards.

Offline Rapunzel

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Slow down.  Let's take it from basics.  A very simple question:  why should educational standards be solely local?  Has nothing to do with common (sense) core or any other set of standards right now, just a very fundamental question.

I'm not a fan of public schools in the first place - it would be my last option for a child.  As to why not the Federal Government  - one main reason is the Federal Government uses education and education dollars to control the states - carrot and stick - "we'll give you some money, but you have to do what we say.".. and depending on who is in the WH at the time, what they want my state to do is not necessarily what the parents of the children in that state wants them to be exposed to..... 

My complaint is CC's "one size fits all."  Its the dumbing down of education in this country - which has been going downhill for a very long time. Kids today could not pass an 8th grade test from a 100 years ago.  Why should they be one-size fits all?  Each child is different, something Common Core doesn't recognize.  Common Core ignores the gains children in charter schools around the nation have made - big gains in many cases... now those teaching methods are to be tossed aside for one-size-fits all CC.

I would not be so anti-Common Core if they were not using it to dumb down education - for instance taking away the classics in literature - using Common Core to brainwash students through the curriculum into a liberal-group-think (many examples posted here over the last year).  Which brings up one of my complaints about public school as a whole - especially the states with union schools -  they use these classes to teach "what" to think instead of teach "how" to think.  There is a difference. 

Our Federal Government has a poor record of getting involved at the states and local levels in schooling - look at how well it didn't work out for them when they pulled Indian children off the reservations and forced them into government schools.  Mark my words - with Common Core we are going to see an even bigger drop out rate in our schools - especially in the minority communities - yet these are the children who have been helped the most in charter schools (look at New York City as an example).

Frankly our schools have been failing for a long time, but Common Core is not the answer to fixing what's broke - I think the biggest thing they could do to start fixing what's broke is get rid of the unions - as long as the unions are running the schools then the only alternative is charter schools or home schooling - but now   SAT changes are being used to try and force both to start teaching Common Core. 

Like the experts on education have said in every program I've watched on this - these are not parents, but educators - in the past schools have been laboratories to try and find what works best and the biggest successes have come from charter schools because free of the unions they have been able to innovate and improve education for some of the kids who were lost in the public system - many poor and minority who are excelling in charter schools - now all that innovation which has worked is to be tossed in the trash can to appease Jeb Bush, Bill Gates and their cronies.  I just think our young minds are too critical to be used to help a few men get more wealthy.
 
�The time is now near at hand which must probably determine, whether Americans are to be, Freemen, or Slaves.� G Washington July 2, 1776

Offline olde north church

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Why this fetish for having school standards be strictly local?  It makes no sense whatsoever.  I can certainly see leaving it to localities to exceed a certain minimum set of standards, but I see no reason why there shouldn't be a uniform (which is distinct from federal) set of minimum standards applicable to all schools.

Beside the money that goes your low-down, no-good brother-in-law's (or cousin's or uncle's) way?  It's also one of the last vestiges of "big fish in a small pondism", like being a small town cop or homeowner's association president or historical society member.
Why?  Well, because I'm a bastard, that's why.

Offline Rapunzel

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�The time is now near at hand which must probably determine, whether Americans are to be, Freemen, or Slaves.� G Washington July 2, 1776

Oceander

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I'm not a fan of public schools in the first place - it would be my last option for a child.  As to why not the Federal Government  - one main reason is the Federal Government uses education and education dollars to control the states - carrot and stick - "we'll give you some money, but you have to do what we say.".. and depending on who is in the WH at the time, what they want my state to do is not necessarily what the parents of the children in that state wants them to be exposed to..... 

My complaint is CC's "one size fits all."  Its the dumbing down of education in this country - which has been going downhill for a very long time. Kids today could not pass an 8th grade test from a 100 years ago.  Why should they be one-size fits all?  Each child is different, something Common Core doesn't recognize.  Common Core ignores the gains children in charter schools around the nation have made - big gains in many cases... now those teaching methods are to be tossed aside for one-size-fits all CC.

I would not be so anti-Common Core if they were not using it to dumb down education - for instance taking away the classics in literature - using Common Core to brainwash students through the curriculum into a liberal-group-think (many examples posted here over the last year).  Which brings up one of my complaints about public school as a whole - especially the states with union schools -  they use these classes to teach "what" to think instead of teach "how" to think.  There is a difference. 

Our Federal Government has a poor record of getting involved at the states and local levels in schooling - look at how well it didn't work out for them when they pulled Indian children off the reservations and forced them into government schools.  Mark my words - with Common Core we are going to see an even bigger drop out rate in our schools - especially in the minority communities - yet these are the children who have been helped the most in charter schools (look at New York City as an example).

Frankly our schools have been failing for a long time, but Common Core is not the answer to fixing what's broke - I think the biggest thing they could do to start fixing what's broke is get rid of the unions - as long as the unions are running the schools then the only alternative is charter schools or home schooling - but now   SAT changes are being used to try and force both to start teaching Common Core. 

Like the experts on education have said in every program I've watched on this - these are not parents, but educators - in the past schools have been laboratories to try and find what works best and the biggest successes have come from charter schools because free of the unions they have been able to innovate and improve education for some of the kids who were lost in the public system - many poor and minority who are excelling in charter schools - now all that innovation which has worked is to be tossed in the trash can to appease Jeb Bush, Bill Gates and their cronies.  I just think our young minds are too critical to be used to help a few men get more wealthy.
 


"One size fits all" is a red herring, a straw man.  What's wrong with having a minimum set of uniform standards that states can then add onto if they're so inclined?  I don't see anything in Common Core that would make it impossible for any local school district to do just that.

Each child is different.  Yes, but that means that the teacher must take into account how different children learn; it doesn't mean that there should be different standards for different children.  Also, Common Core does, in fact, move in that direction - to the extent that a standard can - by emphasizing the use of various strategies to get to the correct answer.  Just because there is one correct answer does not mean that there is only one correct way to get to that answer.  For a very simple example, consider multiplying 72 by 9.  There are (at least) two ways to get to the correct answer (which is 648).  First, one could do traditional column-based multiplication:
                          72
                        x  9
                       -----

which would look something like:

                        1
                        72
                     x   9
                    ------
                       648

which denotes: (a) multiply 2 by 9, write 8 in the ones column and carry the 1 over to the tens column, (b) multiply 7 by 9, getting 63, then add 1, getting 64, and write 4 in the tens column, and (c) since there is nothing in the hundreds column, we implicitly carry the 6 over to the hundreds column, add it to 0, and get 6, which is written in the hundreds column, giving us the answer 648.

Second, once one knows the rule of thumb for multiplying by 10 - move each digit over one column and put a zero in the ones column - you can proceed like so:

                   (72 x 10) - 72 = 720 - 72

                    611
                   7210
               -    72
               -------
                  648

which is numeric shorthand for: (a) multiply 72 by 10, getting 720, (b) subtract 72 from 720 by (i) borrowing 1 from the hundreds column, adding it as 10 to the tens column, then borrowing 1 from the tens column and adding it as 10 to the ones column, (ii) subtracting 2 from 10, leaving 8 in the ones column, (iii) subtracting 7 from 11, leaving 4 in the tens column, and (iv) subtracting zero from 6, leaving 6 in the hundreds column, resulting in the answer 648.

There's another way that's similar to the way I do subtraction of large numbers:

(a) multiply 72 by 10, getting 720,
(b) subtract 72 from 720, by (i) subtracting 20 from both, leaving the equation 700 minus 52, (ii) subtracting 50 from both, leaving 650 minus 2, and (iii) finish the problem by subtracting 2 from 650, leaving the final answer of 648.

That last, btw, is similar to the "chunking" method, which is one of the methods they use to teach children how to divide big numbers.

Now, there are two reasons why children should be taught several methods to get at the correct answer:  first, because it makes it easier for each child to find a method that suits him/her best - doing traditional column subtraction with carrying digits over and etc can be confusing, and can be difficult to keep in one's head if the numbers have more than one or two digits each - and second, because it shows children as obviously as is possible that there are different ways to solve the problem and get the correct answer, which is important because it develops analytical flexibility.

So, far from being some sort of educational bed of procrustes, Common Core provides the potential for bending the learning to match the child without giving up on the reality that there is only one correct answer.  Making children do rote memorization of traditional column division, multiplication, subtraction, or addition is not nearly as useful.

Taking the classics out?  The fact that so many kids have to take remedial English classes as freshmen in college, and that fact alone, should be sufficient proof that we need to first focus on teaching kids how to actually read and write at all before we start trying to make them grapple with the classics.  A child who cannot read above a 5th grade level will never grasp the joys or subtleties of, say, Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, until he or she can read at a higher grade level; so better to spend the limited time, effort, and money at the primary and secondary school levels making sure everyone can read and write well enough that they don't have to take remedial English in college and can instead use their time engaging with, and enjoying, the classics, like Hemingway.  I can give you a personal anecdote for why this matters.  When I was 11 years old my father challenged me to read Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions.  Well, I read it from cover to cover, and won my $1 from pops, but I can tell you that I didn't really understand it because when I re-read it in college I discovered that it was a completely different book from the one I remembered and, furthermore, that it actually made some sense, sense that I couldn't grasp when I first read it.

I say that, at this point in time, it's a better idea to take the classics out of primary and secondary school and focus on teaching kids to actually read and write in the first place.

As far as brainwashing goes, I haven't seen a single example of brainwashing posted up here yet.  Furthermore, as the current parlous state of the US public education system  - and of the American electorate - should demonstrate, there's been quite a lot of brainwashing accomplished under the old standards, which essentially proves that it's not the standards that brainwash, but the people who are supposed to be teaching who brainwash.


Common Core is likely to do much better in charter schools than in public schools - at least in NYC - precisely because the teachers in charter schools are better and more motivated and the charter schools can actually remove a poorly-performing teacher almost immediately.  Furthermore, as I have demonstrated several times above, Common Core is a set of standards to be reached by whatever means possible, it does not prescribe one iron-clad way of doing things to get to those standards.  In point of fact, with its emphasis on learning how to think, if you will, Common Core has more flexibility, not less, than the old standards it's supposed to be replacing.