Posted on 06/21/2016 9:27:17 AM PDT by Kaslin
If you want to understand the catastrophe of education during the Obama administration, a new book by Dr. Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, is a must-read. His book is entitled "Drilling Through the Core: Why Common Core Is Bad for American Education."
Common Core is the education fad that swept the nation with the deceptive slogan "higher standards." Everyone is for "higher standards," right? Who could possibly object to higher standards for all our kids?
As Dr. Wood explains, though, the word "higher" did not mean higher intellectual content of the standards, but a higher percentage of students passing them. Simple math shows that the easiest way to get more students to pass a test is to make the standards (or the passing score) lower, not higher.
The goal was revealed in a famous "white paper" that Common Core architects David Coleman and Jason Zimba wrote for the Carnegie Corporation in 2008. Coleman and Zimba called for new standards that would result in "dramatically raising the number and diversity of students performing at the highest levels."
The education establishment quickly accepted the theory that new standards would help close the "achievement gap" between minority kids from poor families, whose test scores are very low, and students from middle-class homes. With millions of dollars of support from foundations, corporations, and the Obama administration, Coleman and Zimba launched a new career developing the Common Core State Standards.
Well, the results are in. Far from closing the gap, Common Core makes the achievement gap even worse.
In 2010, Kentucky was the first state to sign up for Common Core's allegedly "higher standards," with the help of federal money from the Obama administration, before the standards had even been written. By 2011-2012, Kentucky had fully implemented the standards and was administering statewide assessments aligned to the Common Core.
The results for the 2014-2015 school year in Kentucky were recently published. Over that three-year period, the performance gap between black kids and white kids expanded from 25 percent to 27 percent in reading and from 20 percent to 24 percent in math.
Now that the damage has been done to Kentucky's lower-performing students, it's easy to see why. Common Core math is based on the theory that students are expected to discover math principles for themselves, instead of memorizing time-tested math shortcuts that almost everyone can learn.
Common Core math forces students to waste an inordinate amount of time on what Dr. Wood calls "tediously complicated forms of computation" instead of simple shortcuts. He says these methods "deliberately drive a wedge between parent and child, since very few parents can crack the code."
The Common Core's reading standards replace literature with non-fiction "informational texts" which require students to engage in "close reading." Even classic literary works are presented only in short excerpts, which are treated primarily as sources of information rather than inspiration.
One educational curriculum that has delivered on its promises is the abstinence program used in the public schools of Collier County, Florida. In the eight years since the program began, births to unwed teen mothers, ages 15 to 19, have fallen an amazing 50 percent, and cases of STDs among girls in the same age group have also dropped from 29th to the third lowest among Florida's 67 counties.
The curriculum distributed by the Collier County Abstinence Program (CCAP) was introduced ten years ago in the 7th and 8th grades, and proved so successful that age-appropriate versions are now used in the 6th and 9th grades as well. CCAP materials published by A&M Partnership are used in all 17 middle schools and all 8 high schools throughout the county.
Collier County is best known for the expensive retirement cities of Naples and Marco Island, but its student population is only 37 percent white. Several factors contributed to making Florida a good place for abstinence education.
Florida state law requires public schools to "teach abstinence from sexual activity outside of marriage as the expected standard for all school-age students while teaching the benefits of monogamous heterosexual marriage." The same law also requires schools to "teach that each student has the power to control personal behavior."
The other key factor is that Florida allows public schools to accept donations of supplementary materials and use those materials in the classroom to fulfill any required curricular objective. The 6th-, 7th-, 8th-, and 9th-grade course books provided without charge by the nonprofit Collier County Abstinence Program were welcomed by classroom teachers who saw how beneficial it is to have healthy kids.
Liberals like to say they are "pragmatic" and use "what works" while accusing conservatives of acting on the basis of "ideology." If you really care about "what works" in middle school, adopt the Collier County Abstinence Program in your public school.
Meanwhile we homseschool and one of my five-year old twins can read at almost a college level and she does math in her head better than I do. She learned math using multiplication tables, division tables, and flash cards. I’m hoping to get her into the first levels of our algebra curriculum if not this year then next year.
And along the way I’ve re-educated myself using the homeschool curriculum and if you look at my posts from 2009 you’ll see it’s made a HUGE difference for me!
Great article by Ms. Schlafly, thanks for posting.
I have a 3 year old and live in a school district with a very VERY good public elementary school (or so I’ve been told from other parents I meet) and I PRAY every day that Trump gets in there in Nov and dismantles the hell out of this stupid Common Core crap. How awful that the smart kids are being thrown to the side so that all the stupid kids can slide by...
Such a freakin nightmare ! What kind of idiot thought any of this was a good idea???
Congrats!
Didn't one of the "educators" involved admit that it was intended to dumb down the higher IQ types (read "races") to make it a level playing field for "everybody"?
From personal experience, my advice to you is to go and see/meet the teacher yourself.
I find that people want their school to be a good school (not like those OTHER bad public schools); so, they will ignore the fact that this school is only marginally better. I had many people tell me about what a great school the local elem school was, and a certain teacher was a must. So, I sent my youngest to that public kindergarten. I figured, hey, kindergarten, what could go wrong. (We put both our girls into Catholic schools starting in 1st grade.)
Well, the first week I begin getting notes from the teacher about how I need to "teach" my child this or that. I asked that the teacher please make sure my daughter put her jacket on when she went out to recess, because she seemed like she might be getting the sniffles. I get a note back telling me I need to teach her how to button her jacket. This is a teacher who had two "student" teachers and an aide helping her. Yet, couldn't help with a kid's jacket. When I spoke to a couple of teachers at the Catholic School where my daughters attended, they were shocked. They expressed the view that, these were just things you had to do when teaching at that grade level. The kids need help. Anyway, final straw, I get a note telling me that my daughter needs to be taken out of her class a couple of times a week to be "helped" by a specialist. Now, this daughter was not the easiest to deal with; but, she was a smart kid. My husband went balistic, and we pulled her from that public kindergarten and placed her into a Montessori School nearby. She did just fine. Need to learn how to button, they have a little wooden mold with a small jacket on it for the kids to practice on. Same with tying shoes. In a week, she could do both.
So, again, go see for yourself.
BFL
You are a very rare bird. Congratulation on your many successes.
EVERYTHING the elitist left does to close the gap between high and low performing students widens the gap. Everything.
My grandson goes to public school but I give him additional math education as much as I can.
The schools don’t care about the kids. All they care about is getting more kids to pass so they can get their money.
Interesting experience.
I/we sent our daughter to an all girl Catholic School from Kindergarten to 5th grade at $12,000 a year. By the third grade we were told that she was “A.D.D.” and needed to be medicated. We rejected their claims. Apparently she asked to many questions and wasn’t falling in line with what they expected. She endured two more years of social abuse from her peers and educators while excelling in every academic class. After moving her to the public school system she was two years ahead of her class and was quickly put on an accelerated tract. She attended one of the best public High Schools in the country since most of the students came from very wealthy parents. They actually cared and were very involved with their kids education.
Her public school experience allowed her to be free to express herself and focus on her education without worrying about being accepted socially. For what it’s worth, her mother nor myself never had to tell her to do her homework, ever. If you ask her today what makes her so responsible, respectful and mature, she will tell you about her Catholic School experience.
Do not let them know you are doing that.
I am not joking.
Seriously?
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