http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/swirsky/130919
“In July, the state of New York announced the results of its first tests based on the Common Core: The region hasn’t been this battered since Superstorm Sandy. Just 26 percent of students in third through eighth grade passed the English exam, and only 30 percent passed the math test. In one Harlem school, just seven percent of students received passing scores in English, and 10 percent in math. We’ve gone from No Child Left Behind to Well-Just-About-Every-Child-Left-Behind …progress of a kind. If ‘learned helplessness’ is the Common Core’s goal, it’s a stunning success.” Businessman George Ball
Indeed, the tests based on the new Common Core (CC) curriculum horrified both parents and educators in New York State, as they are sure to do in the 45 other states that have accepted these new federal-education standards.
Yet in the very definition of a clueless response to the disastrous test results, NY State Education Commissioner John B. King, Jr. said that “these proficiency scores do not reflect a drop in performance, but rather a raising of standards to reflect college and career readiness in the 21st century.” Nice try, Mr. King. Go back to sleep.
How did this happen? Here’s a little history. When President George W. Bush introduced No Child Left Behind, liberals and teachers’ unions went crazy. How dare any program actually measure the effectiveness of classroom teachers or, worse, hold them accountable for decade after decade of failure? How dare that same program document the great number of students allowed to progress through grade after grade in spite of jaw-dropping deficits in math and literacy? Isn’t it wrongheaded, critics asked, to ‘teach to the test’ instead of giving students better skills and deeper knowledge? As if testing skills and knowledge is a bad thing!
Of course the “evolved” progressives and educrats among us decided to contrive a better mousetrap for improving the devolving state of American public-school education and they called their brainchild Common Core, a program that was formally adopted by the federal government in 2010 and by NY State in 2011. Other contributors to this dumbed-down excuse for education included members of the leftist Aspen Institute which was founded in 1950 to, among other things, “define a good society.”
Common Core has a nice ring, doesn’t it, suggesting that we’re all in this together and we all believe in education that includes America’s “core” values?
Don’t be fooled. As author and journalist Dean Kalahar writes, “Common Core…may look delicious, but before you take a bite out of the apple, it might be a good idea to know a razor is inside.”
As Kalahar explains, “President Obama and Education Secretary [Arne] Duncan falsely said the Common Core standards were developed by the states and voluntarily adopted. CC was actually developed by an organization called Achieve, approved by the National Governors Association and funded by the Gates Foundation by at least $173 million dollars. The [cash-starved] states were bribed by $4.35 billion ‘Race to the Top’ dollars if they adopted the standards. Federal laws prohibit the U.S. Department of Education from prescribing any curriculum, but four billion is a big carrot – or is it a stick? Forty-six states and the District of Columbia have sold out… I mean ‘signed on.'”
According to journalist Nick Wills, the Common Core curriculum was implemented with virtually no empirical evidence of its value, and it was rushed into school systems without consulting – drum roll here – students, teachers and parents! Education-reformer Diane Ravitch says that the standards have been adopted “without any field test … imposed on the children of this nation despite the fact that no one has any idea how they will affect students, teachers, or schools.”
This takes on a certain grotesque logic when, according to businessman George Ball, you realize that in “the 60-person work group that developed the curriculum, there was not one practicing teacher! David Coleman, chief architect of the Common Core curriculum, now heads the College Board. That’s worrisome, and so is Coleman’s background as a consultant at McKinsey & Co., the firm that so ably advised Kmart, Enron, Swissair and Global Crossing.”
But so irresponsible were our educators and so avaricious to feed at the federal trough that they bought the whole package without even a sneak-peek at its contents.
What did they buy? Kalahar states that “for all intents and purposes, Common Core is nationalized education. History has shown that state-run information control, which begins with education, has always led to disastrous results, [for example] the USSR, Germany, and Cuba.
“The foundational philosophy of Common Core,” Kalahar adds, “is to create students ready for social action so they can force a social-justice agenda.”
According to Wall St. Journal writer David Feith: “Common Core is about an obsession with race, class, gender, and sexuality as the forces of history and political identity…nationalizing education via Common Core is about promoting an agenda of anti-capitalism, sustainability, white guilt, global citizenship, self-esteem, affective math, and culture-sensitive spelling and language. This is done in the name of consciousness raising, moral relativity, fairness, diversity, and multiculturalism.”
Again, with zero input from students, teachers and parents – and zero knowledge by any parents about what is going on in their children’s classrooms!