We came across this website: TheCommonCore.com It is a pretty slick propaganda campaign backed by corporate interests who are promoting and funding Common Core, the attempt to nationalize education in the US.
Let us bust some of their “myth” busters…
1 – The Common Core State Standards are not a curriculum.
Nonsense. Any teacher today knows they will be tracked, traced, watched, spied on, written up and harassed and even fired if they don’t follow the exact methods and content prescribed by whatever new fad program is being implemented at the time. Common Core embraces all types of practices that are not only ineffective but detrimental to teaching. FACT: There is NO MORE ACADEMIC FREEDOM FOR TEACHERS TO TEACH HOW THEY THINK IS BEST.
2 – The Common Core State Standards were developed by a group of states that voluntarily elected to work together to raise the bar on what students should know and be able to do by subject.
More nonsense. The Common Core Standards are known to be inferior to what states like Indiana, Massachusetts and California had in place.
3 – Local school boards retain the same level of authority they had prior to the adoption of the Common Core State Standards.
Maybe. If this is true, why are they being pressured to support, and in most cases, do end up supporting Common Core despite the protestations of parents, teachers and taxpayers?
4 – The Common Core State Standards were developed by a thoughtful and transparent process led by the National Governors Association (NGA) and Council for Chief State School Officers (CCSSO).
Whopper! Most had no idea that NH started implementing these ‘standards’ in 2010. Transparency? Hardly. Besides, the NGA and the CCSSO are NOT EVEN GOVERNMENT ORGANIZATIONS BUT PRIVATE ORGANIZATIONS! What right did they have to create something that would be imposed on every school child in the country? Members of the Validation Committee had to sign “confidentiality agreements” and were unable to access notes, agendas, etc because they held private meetings.
5 – The Standards were informed by the best education practices in the country, the highest international standards, and evidence and expertise about educational outcomes.
Baloney. Most of the pedagogy is flawed in that it employs FAD LEARNING METHODOLOGIES and PRACTICES that have been failures since the early 1970s when first tried. There is NO data to suggest otherwise. (For example, the ‘flipped classroom’, ‘cooperative learning’, and ‘child-centered learning’.)
6 – International benchmarking played a significant role in developing the Standards
We don’t know why internationalism rears its ugly head here. We want to do what’s best for AMERICAN kids. Internationally benchmarked to what countries? We keep hearing this claim but no one has pointed to the top performing countries and their standards or have shown a side by side comparison with the Common Core Standards.
7 – No data collection is required as part of the Common Core State Standards initiative. In fact, it is illegal for the federal government to collect any student-identifiable data.
More nonsense. This data has been collected for years. Teachers have been asked to keep dossiers on students and in fact, dossiers have been kept on teachers who do not follow the ‘program’.
8 – The Common Core State Standards recognize that both content and skills are important.
Wrong. Like most globalist programs, CC believes that individuals skills should take a backseat to attitudes and values that would make students into globally acceptable workers for the coming world order. This is why you are seeing children tested and surveyed for their beliefs.
9 – The Common Core State Standards require an emphasis on literature, including Shakespeare as well as fiction specifically selected by each state and local school district.
This type of literature may or may not be included. It’s the use of unnecessarily prurient and inappropriate texts that is of concern, texts that often have little to do with the subject area. In fact some of the literature has parents up in arms because of the graphic sexual content.
10 – The Common Core State Standards do accommodate and prepare students for Algebra 1 in 8th grade, by including the prerequisites for this course in grades K-7.
If you push the standards down a grade level, this can happen. However we know that as they are written, students will be prepared for Algebra I by 9th grade. That’s about 2 years behind their high performing international peers.
11 – The Common Core State Standards drafting process relied on teachers and education experts from across the country.
The feedback may have been thrown in the trash according to one participant who was invited to review the draft standards. We also know that feedback from the only two content experts, Drs. Milgram and Stotsky, were NOT included in the final draft. That feedback would have elevated the CCSS to the level many parents want for their children.
12 – The Common Core State Standards drafting process relied on teachers and education experts from across the country.
See response to #11.
13 – The Common Core State Standards have made careful use of a large and growing body of evidence.
Interestingly, we never see any of this ‘evidence’.
14 – The Common Core State Standards are not a curriculum.
Standards and assessments drive the curriculum. In the case of the Common Core Math Standards, there is an emphasis on strategies and explaining your answer. This certainly drives pedagogy but unfortunately pedagogy that we know has been problematic to math education in this country in the past. In the case of English/Langugae Arts, there is a shift in focus away from classical literature in favor of informational texts.
Teaching multiple algorithms or strategies to young children adds confusion and will often times kill the love of learning math in a child. That is not a recipe for success but a set up for failure.