Protecting Educational Freedom This Independence Day: Cracks in the Common Core
Lindsey Burke
July 4, 2013 at 10:57 am
Just in time for Independence Day, the foundations of the Common Core initiative are showing some cracks.
Common Core is an effort to establish national standards and tests to define what every child in public school will learn. It has been heavily incentivized by the Obama Administration and is an unprecedented federal overreach into local school policy. But recent moves in several states across the country could mean that curriculum freedom remains alive and well.
On Monday, Oklahoma superintendent of education Janet Barresi announced that the Sooner State would be pulling out of the Common Core testing consortia. Barresi told the Tulsa World that because of myriad technical problems with the assessments and higher anticipated costs, “If we move ahead with this, we are going to be asking the state to drink a milkshake using a cocktail straw.”
Oklahoma’s withdrawal follows Alabama, which also withdrew from the common assessments earlier this year. Both states still plan to follow the Common Core standards but will be assessing how students perform on those standards with tests they have chosen.
Some states have gone a step further to ensure educational freedom. Indiana Governor Mike Pence (R) has paused implementation of Common Core for the next year, allowing the state to assess the cost to taxpayers and affording the Indiana Department of Education and a legislative study committee the opportunity to determine whether Common Core standards are superior to Indiana’s existing standards.
Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett (R) has likewise hit the pause button on Common Core standards implementation, allowing time for the standards to be approved by the legislative education committees and the state’s Regulatory Review Commission. And in Michigan, Governor Rick Snyder (R) signed a budget prohibiting any new state funds from being expended on Common Core implementation.
Other states might reconsider their Common Core involvement. Early adopters such as New York and Kentucky are now experiencing implementation problems. In North Carolina, the state board of education has decided to review the standards over the next few months. Lieutenant Governor and state board of education member Dan Forest worries that “in the rush to roll out Common Core, I am not convinced the proper due diligence has been conducted to properly budget for this monumental expenditure for our state.”
Utah, Colorado, South Carolina, and Kansas have had heated debates about the merits of Common Core and the certain loss of educational autonomy associated with the effort. At a minimum, they would be wise to follow the lead of Indiana and “pause” implementation to determine the costs and quality. Better still, they should pull out completely from the Common Core national standards and work to strengthen and improve their own state standards.
The Founders placed the important job of educating America’s children with states, localities, and, most critically, parents. The Constitution does not contain the word education, even though its architects believed in its supreme importance. “I look to the diffusion of light and education as the resource to be relied on for ameliorating the condition, promoting the virtue, and advancing the happiness of man,” wrote Thomas Jefferson. The Founders would have likely seen the prospect of a national curriculum as a monumental government overreach.
As we celebrate our Independence this week, it’s a good time to recommit to restoring the educational freedom our Founders envisioned.
Since education is not specifically in the Constitution as a federal responsibility it is a state right.
The federal government is creating a bureaucracy around education. The federal government is the last entity that should be involved in education. They do not have a track record of doing anything well. They will surely make things worse.
I have no problem with state educators getting together to come up with goals as long as they cannot be forced on states that do not want them.
The federal government needs to get back to their core responsibilities and focus on doing well in a very limited set of departments.
Common Core …aka State Indoctrination and Propoganda Program
Hey PJ: Found the following information linking Bill Ayers to Common Core curriculum at https://townhall.com/columnists/marygrabar/2013/05/15/bill-ayers-bringing-down-america-destroying-education-n1596641/page/full
Bill Ayers: Bringing Down America, Destroying Education
Mary Grabar | May 15, 2013
In 1969, hippies and the Vietnam War were abstractions to me, glimpses from photos in an occasional Life Magazine. I had not heard about the Weathermen.
I was twelve years old. In the following year my main source of normalcy and inspiration—my school day–would be turned upside down. I would go to a high school where riots and the threats of riots were commonplace.
Anti-American forces were at work to bring down America.
While I was worrying about junior high school, Larry Grathwohl, who had just come back to Cincinnati from Vietnam, was infiltrating the domestic terrorist group Weatherman, the only one to have done so. Larry saved potentially hundreds of lives when he alerted the FBI to a bomb placed near a Detroit police station and a restaurant.
Bill Ayers, Education Secretary of Weatherman, told him that in the revolution, lives would have to be sacrificed.
This week I have been traveling with Larry and Tina Trent, who have helped republish Larry’s memoir Bringing Down America, about his days with the domestic terrorists. Tina tells the story as we speak to various groups in Florida this week about how she happened to read Larry’s book in high school in the late 1970s. It was the one truthful one amidst a growing collection already devoted to hagiographies of the 1960s radicals in the library.
My interest in Bill Ayers began a few years ago when I learned about his career as a “Distinguished Professor of Education.” In reality he was working to destroy everything that was good about our education system. Ayers, after escaping punishment in 1980, used his position at the University of Illinois at Chicago, to spread his revolutionary ideas throughout the educational system–in the classes he taught, the books and articles he wrote, the conferences he attended, the dissertation committees he sat on, and the political connections he fostered with Barack Obama and Arne Duncan on the Annenberg Challenge.
One of the things that has encouraged me as we’ve talked to these groups is the awareness of Obama and Duncan’s education plan called Common Core. This is a complete federal power grab with an agenda in line with the educational aims of Bill Ayers. The last refuge of conservatives for education, homeschooling and private schools, will effectively be eliminated under Common Core.
I have no evidence directly connecting Bill Ayers to the writing of Common Core, but I do have evidence that Bill Ayers is still very influential in educational circles crafting the project. As I noted in my report for Accuracy in Media, in 2009, Bill Ayers was a keynote speaker at a Washington, D.C., education conference, alongside Arne Duncan, his Under Secretary, and a representative from Achieve, a well-connected D.C.-based non-profit credited with being the architect of Common Core. Linda Darling-Hammond, a longtime close associate of Bill Ayers, and Obama’s education transition team leader, is in charge of developing one of the two national tests that will be administered under Common Core.
More recently, Duncan, Darling-Hammond, and Ayers participated in the annual meeting of AERA, the American Educational Research Association, held in San Francisco from April 27 to May 1, 2013. This professional association boasts of over 25,000 members consisting of faculty, researchers, and graduate students who work at universities and colleges, federal and state agencies, school systems, test companies, and non-profit agencies. Ayers used to be vice president for curriculum in the organization.
Ayers was listed in the program as participating in eight activities this year, including a panel discussion called “The Role of Education in the Quest for Freedom,” “Dystopia and Education,” “Social Imagination and Political Activism in Education,” and “Making Comics as Educational Research and Theory” (his book To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher was adapted into a “graphic,” or comic, book in 2010; it is used widely in colleges of education).
Ayers also coauthored and presented a paper with the Marxist professor of education, Peter McLaren, titled “In Memoriam: Hugo Chavez.” Ayers had traveled at least four times to speak in Venezuela to promote his idea of education as “the motor-force of revolution.”
The Department of Education bragged about Arne Duncan’s speech at the AERA conference, which appeared to be devoted entirely to sessions advocating social justice and not academics. They did not mention Ayers.
In his address, Duncan talked about the “sea-change” in “assessments” under Common Core. Darling-Hammond’s tests, he said approvingly, would address “deeper learning.” “Diagnostic or formative assessments” will measure “student growth,” and determine whether students are “college-and-career ready.” Much in line with Ayers’s pedagogical strategy, Duncan hailed the forthcoming Assessment 3.0 that “will shift from seat-based learning to competency-based learning.” The “next frontier in assessment research,” said Duncan, is in “non-cognitive skills.”
Why would a school want to measure “non-cognitive skills” and what does this mean? Aren’t students supposed to be tested on their “cognitive skills,” their knowledge in subjects like history and science, and their skills in subject like math and writing?
Welcome to the Brave New World of social and emotional learning. As I noted, Darling-Hammond has served on the board of CASEL (Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning), based at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where Ayers taught. Welcome to the Bill Ayers way of teaching, through emotionally invasive sessions, indoctrination, chaos, and confusion. (I describe this in my new book Bill Ayers: Teaching Revolution.)
It may be called “Assessment 3.0,” but it sounds an awful lot like the “criticism/self-criticism” sessions of the Weathermen Larry Grathwohl has been describing to me and to our audiences.
Weatherman recruited in high schools. Now they’ve essentially entered the Department of Education.
It’s no longer abstract when you can’t hide or remove your children.
For more information on our tour, go to http://www.bringingdownamerica.com. The site includes an archive of newspaper articles and documents about the Weathermen, compiled by Tina Trent. In it you will see the shameful history of the media endorsing the Weathermen and helping them lie about their violent pasts. If you’d like to have us come speak to your group, contact us. We’ll be in Georgia next month.
PJ: Local school district in Colorado is trying to reject Common Core. Below that story is a comment on the same story by a FreeRepublic reader. Found at
Woodland Park parents stand up against national education standards
By Carol McGraw Published: August 8, 2013
A group of Woodland Park parents and educators want to get rid of the Common Core Academic Standards that are being implemented in Colorado Schools.
Teller County Citizens Against Common Core Standards maintains the new academic guidelines aren’t as good as the ones in place. It also argues that the system is unconstitutional because it takes local control away from school districts.
It may lobby Woodland Park School District RE-2 and the state to drop out.
“We want to get the word out. The standards were just a money carrot for the state to get federal money,” contends Carolyn Fairchild, the Teller County group’s spokeswoman and who taught school for 32 years. Money was set aside by the federal government in significant Race to the Top grants for states that came on board.
About 55 people attended the group’s information meeting earlier this week.
“Most people said they were alarmed that our academics will get worse under the new standards,” Fairchild said.
She believes that common core will be even more test oriented than classroom instruction is now.
“Common Core Standards will be state assessments on steroids.”
The Common Core Standards are a single set of educational requirements for kindergarten through 12th grade in English language arts and math that are expected to bridge the country’s global educational gap. By aligning what students learn across the country, state officials have said that such disparities will be alleviated. In the past, states and districts developed their own standards and some were more rigorous than others.
Among other things, critics say that classic literature and certain math subjects are being left out of the core standards.
Colorado Department of Education website information says that the Common Core Standards “reflect more rigourous and clear expectations than the Colorado Academic Standards.” Education experts, parents, teachers and administrators from around the U.S. worked on the standards for several years, as did educators in Colorado.
Four states have refused the alignment. Last month, Douglas County School Board in suburban Denver adopted a resolution to oppose the standards in favor of its own, which they consider superior. Randi Weingarten, head of American Federation of Teachers, in April urged a “moratorium on assessment-driven sanctions tied to Common Core State Standards until solid implementation plans are embedded in schools and proven effective through a year or more of field testing,” according to the AFT website.
Woodland Park School District officials were not available for comment.
For those wanting more information, the email address for the new organization is coloradoagainstcommoncore@yahoo.com.
_______________________________
Common Core national standards will set our children back one to two years. The math standards specifically are markedly inferior to all three sets of standards used for comparison .
So what is missing in the new Common Core Math Standards? A few examples:
• Probability — gone in elementary grades.
• Mean, median, mode, and range — gone in elementary grades.
• The concept of pi, including area and circumference of circles – gone in elementary grades.
• Division of a fraction by a fraction – gone in elementary grades.
• The Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic (prime factorization) – gone completely.
• Using fractions, decimals, and percents interchangeably — gone completely.
• Measurement (including density, velocity, and scientific notation) – no measurement instruction after 5th grade.
• Algebra — inadequate readiness in the elementary grades and pushed back one year (from middle school – 8th grade – to high school – 9th grade). This means most students will not reach calculus in high school, as expected by selective universities. And because algebra is the gateway to higher mathematics, Common Core’s approach reduces the likelihood that students will be prepared for university-level math.
https://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3053206/posts