She wins

via Woodsterman

Betsy DeVos is not a supporter of Common Core

Earlier today I read in Breitbart that Trump's choice for Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, is a supporter of Common Core. She is not. Here is what she has to say.

How do you feel about this?

From the Babylon Bee:

WASHINGTON, D.C.—An update issued Monday to the 2016–2017 Common Core educational standards now allows students to answer mathematics problems by responding with whatever their feelings are telling them at the time, sources confirmed.

One example problem given to illustrate the updated standards asked students to figure out when a 6:00 a.m. train leaving Boston at thirty miles per hour and a 7:00 a.m. Milwaukee train headed the opposite direction at forty miles per hour will intersect. A list of possible solutions to the sample problem published in the Common Core standards obtained by reporters indicated that “Ugh,” “I’m offended,” “Triggered,” “Trains scare me,” “Boston scares me,” “Milwaukee scares me,” and “Kill yourself,” would all be scored as correct.

“Any emotion, feeling, statement, or catchphrase is an acceptable answer to most of the problems in the new mathematics standards,” a Common Core representative told reporters. “As long as students are being sincere, genuine, authentic, and true to themselves at the time they are answering the question, that’s all we can ask as educators.”

“Who are we to tell anyone that their own mathematical truth is wrong?” the rep added.

According to the rep, the Common Core standards will be updated next year to include feelings as acceptable responses to any and all questions pertaining to biology, chemistry, grammar, and history, while sources claim that English literature teachers have already been accepting emotions as responses for years.

Is it really about the kids?

One size fits all. It's all about the money!



h/t Adrienne's Corner

Common Core math

Jason Howerton reports at The Blaze,

A fed-up Ohio dad recently decided to make a serious point by sending a donation check to his kid’s school using the longform Common Core math standards they expect children to use.

Take a look at the check and see if you can see how much the dad’s check is worth:

Read more here.

Common Core's complicated math

Paula Bolyard writes at PJ Media,

It took Sophia Abelita just under two minutes to demonstrate exactly why kids — and their parents — are so frustrated with Common Core math.

Attempting to solve a simple 3-digit arithmetic problem, Sophia first shows how students are expected to complete the problem using Common Core’s “base 10″ method. It takes her a minute, twenty seconds. Then Sophia flipped her paper over and completed the same problem — in fifteen seconds!

Is it any wonder parents all over the country are demanding that schools ditch Common Core?

Read more here.

Do you know where Fiorina stands on immigration, climate change, and Common Core?

Sundance at The Last Refuge is writing a lot of interesting stuff about the GOP candidates. He believes the thing is rigged for Jeb Bush, and he shows us Bush's plan to win the nomination. He further believes that Donald Trump is the best hope for derailing the inevitable Bush candidacy. But what about Carly Fiorina? Sundance writes,

Maybe we should be looking a little closer at Carly. She’s so good, even her competing candidates want to keep her in the race.

Carly Fiorina on Immigration: Pass the DREAM Act. For other undocumented immigrants, a direct path to citizenship is unfair. While running for the U.S. Senate in California in 2010, Fiorina said she supports the DREAM Act, which would give legal status to people who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children.

Carly Fiorina on Climate change: It is real and manmade. But government has limited ability to address it. Speaking in New Hampshire in February, Fiorina said there is scientific consensus that climate change is real and caused by humans.

Carly Fiorina on Education: Supports Common Core – Set national standards but give local districts maximum control. No Child Left Behind was positive. In a position paper while running for the U.S. Senate in California, Fiorina strongly advocated for metric-based accountability in schools. She praised No Child Left Behind as setting high standards and Race to the Top for using internationally-benchmarked measures.

She, along with Jeb, seem to remind people their state can always “opt out”. Yet they always seem to skip the whole part about national standard being tied to the federal funding allocation. Meaning education funding blackmail – “Opt out, and you don’t get the funds”… but you can always “opt out”.

…”Nice school you got there, it’d be a shame if anything happened to it”….

Wait, Carly (who said Mitt Romney talked her into running) Fiorina supports Man-Made Global Warming, Common Core -AND- the Dream Act, and Ted Cruz is giving her money? Oh well, they must just be great friends n’ stuff – meh.

Read more here, including a list of who is giving money to whom.

Nationwide defiance against Common Core

Joy Pullman writes at The Federalist,

While Charles Murray has been out promoting measured civil disobedience in an effort to restore individual liberty, thousands of parents and children have been acting upon the same concept. This spring has seen an extraordinary nationwide defiance movement aimed against standardized tests, thanks to Common Core.

...In Germantown, Wisconsin, 62 percent of public-school students are sitting out tests. The district has been a hotbed of Common Core opposition, with a local school board among one of the handful nationwide to reject Common Core and decide to run with its own, higher-quality, curriculum. In Maine, “Cape Elizabeth saw 32 percent of its eighth-graders, 18 percent of its seventh-graders and 64 percent of its high school juniors opt out. There are many examples of high opt out rates across the state, but a reliable statewide tally isn’t yet available.” A bill to secure parents’ right to excuse their kids from mandatory tests recently passed the Delaware House 36 to 3 after a blaze of opt-outs left local schools scrambling. “A wide-ranging bill that would eliminate [national Common Core] tests in Ohio and limit state achievement tests to three hours per year passed the House 92-1 on Wednesday,” reported the Columbus Dispatch.

This is nowhere near a set of isolated incidents. In Washington state, every single junior at Nathan Hale High School (natch) refused state tests this spring. Somewhere around 200,000 children refused tests this spring in New York and, contrary to race-baiting from U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, substantial numbers of these defiant parents were not white rich people.

...So we’re losing both money and freedom. We’re losing money and our dignity. We’re sacrificing kids’ spirits and futures to bureaucrats who have never taught a child and can’t budget their way into the right amount to tip a waiter.

Read more here.

Deceiving our children about Islam

Carol Brown writes:

Muslim Brotherhood front groups have been, and continue to be, integrally involved in the development of Common Core curriculum. They make sure a false picture of Islam is integrated into lessons, from K – 12. Our children are exposed to all manner of “educational” activities that amount to Islamic propaganda, which is now endemic in the school system.

Factor in political leadership that is clueless (at best) or willfully collaborating with the enemy (at worst) along with an electorate that has been marinating in politically-correct-multicultural-moral-equivalence “thinking,” and you’ve got a powerful force mangling the minds of our youth.

I wish I could call what is going on a battle. Or a war. But I can’t. Because thus far America has hardly put up a fight. And so, Islam advances. Marching through the halls of our schools.

Go here to read many examples of what our kids are being taught.

Lose the primary, and win the general election?

Can you explain to me how a presidential candidate can lose the primary, but win the general election? That's what Jeb Bush said he is prepared to do! News flash for you, Jeb: if you lose the primary, you don't get to be the nominee of the Republican party in the general election! Jonathan Martin writes:

Mr. Bush said at The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council in Washington that Republican candidates must be willing to “lose the primary to win the general, without violating your principles.”

Huh?


Common Core lover Jeb Bush attends the National Summit on Education Reform in Washington last month. Credit Susan Walsh/Associated Press

Sunlight is the best disinfectant. The ballot box is the ultimate sanitizer.

Michelle Malkin writes that

The Davids of the Stop Common Core movement are exercising their freedoms of speech and association to beat back the deep-pocketed Goliaths at their schoolhouse doors.

As always, sunlight is the best disinfectant. The ballot box is the ultimate sanitizer. Ideas have consequences. And Indiana is a harbinger. If the Common Core cheerleaders and rebranders in both parties think their bad ideas won’t ever come back to haunt them at the polls, they are in for a very rude awakening.

Read more here.

"Align"

Disregarding the creativity of federalism. We've had fifty years of federal involvement that has coincided with stagnation in test scores across the country.

Think for themselves?

Here is a letter of resignation from a woman who loves teaching.

"I can no longer be a part of a system that continues to do the exact opposite of what I am supposed to do as a teacher - I am supposed to help them think for themselves, help them find solutions to problems, help them become productive members of society. Instead, the emphasis is on Common Core Standards and high stakes testing that is creating a teach to the test mentality for our teachers, and stress and anxiety for our students."

She added, "Students have increasingly become hesitant to think for themselves, because they have been programmed to believe that there is one right answer.

Read more here.

Report card time

Found at American Digest

If you like your textbook, you can keep your textbook

Krista Kafer writes that

If Common Core were voluntary guidance rather than state-mandated standards and PARCC assessments were one of many measures a school could use to track performance, there would be little controversy. Educators would regard them as useful tools. As they stand now, however, these one-size-fits-all requirements reduce professional and parental choices in education and impose heavy costs.

If you like that textbook, don't count on keeping it.

Can conservatives grow to like Common Core?

Kevin T. Brady and Stephen M. Klugewicz acknowledge that conservatives are pushing back against Common Core.

Are American high school granduates deficient in their understanding of American History? Yes!

Recent results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) U.S. History exams reveal that when eighteen-year-olds leave high school, 88% of them score below a proficiency level, meaning their U.S. history knowledge is below grade level. Fifty-five percent of 12th graders are below even a basic, partial mastery of the content.

The little content that history and social studies teachers do receive tends to be colored by a liberal worldview. Howard Zinn’s infamous A People’s History of the United States, first published in 1980, remains the nation’s best-selling survey textbook, selling about 125,000 copies each year.[6] Zinn, a self-proclaimed radical, has heavily influenced many of today’s textbooks.[7] His work is infused with a clear theme: America is a corrupt nation founded upon the lie of equal opportunity and designed in reality to empower the wealthy. On numerous occasions, Zinn has stated that the world would be a much better place if the United States had never existed.[8] Following Zinn, radical activists such as former domestic terrorist Bill Ayers have promoted educational reforms aimed at indoctrinating children in an effort to overthrow the existing social order in favor of a system built on a Left-wing version of “social justice.”

I saw Zinn's book on the desk of the teacher who teaches history to both of my sons. I confronted her about it, and she replied that she just uses it to promote empathy for Native Americans. Both my sons really like this teacher, something I cannot say for many of their other teachers.

The point for the conservatives is that teachers and educational boards would likely have assigned the objectionable assignments and texts noted above even if the Common Core never existed. For conservatives, the fact that the standards promote the study of primary sources and require students to provide reasoned arguments, including examples from those sources, should be seen as positives. Again, one needs to bear in mind that the Common Core is skill-based, not content-based; teachers can choose whatever texts they wish in their effort to teach their students literacy skills.

It is not the intention of the present authors to defend the Common Core in toto. It is our intent, however, to demonstrate to conservatives that the Common Core Standards actually provide them with an opportunity to accomplish their ends too. For better or worse, for the foreseeable future it appears that the vast majority of states will soon tie the evaluation of their teachers to student performance on achievement tests based on the new standards. Although the Common Core Standards are likely to have a significant impact on education in America, it is important to remember that educational standards and reforms come and go. Whether or not a state has adopted the Common Core, there is an opportunity for anyone, including those on the political Right, to influence the content that is taught when it comes to literature and history.

The Common Core Standards are far from perfect or complete and certainly do not constitute the long-sought-after “solution” to the problems in American education. In regard to the English Language Arts with its history and social studies exemplars, they at least emphasize critical reading skills and an opportunity for conservatives to have a say in which exemplar texts are used in classrooms. Conservative critics should keep in mind that both teacher unions and many individual teachers also oppose the Common Core, largely because they see it as impinging on academic freedom and simply because teachers generally resent being told what to do in their classrooms. Conservative columnist Ramesh Ponnuru is right in characterizing the fight over the Common Core as “a dismal cycle of elite disdain and populist outrage, each side feeding the other’s worst impulses.” The debate has thus become clouded and slogans have replaced reason, especially on the Right. It is time for conservatives either to oppose the Common Core on legitimate grounds or to drop their opposition and find ways to make the new standards serve their ends.

Denver Post in favor of Common Core

The Denver Post editorializes today on Common Core. Although the blogosphere seems to be full of stories critical of Common Core, the Post is strongly for it. The Post does admit that 40% of Colorado High School graduates who enter college need remedial help in at least one subject. But it believes Common Core standards will improve that pitiful result.

Parents need to know, then speak out!

Some bloggers are writing here and here about a book that has been approved nationally for Common Core. It is Toni Morrison's book entitled "The Bluest Eye." It is about a pedophile raping a young black girl, and it is told with sympathy for the pedophile!

Why don't we just manufacture robots, instead of students? They last longer, and they always do what they are told!

There has been another rollout of another federal program, Common Core. Some people are saying that it is an even greater bust than Obamacare.

Ethan Young, a senior at Farragut High School in Knox County, Tenn., made an impassioned argument for dropping the new national education guidelines, which he called “a glowing conflict of interest … that illustrate a mistrust of teachers.”

“Somewhere our Founding Fathers are turning in their graves,” he said.

"In reality Common Core was contrived by an insular group of educational testing executives, with only two academic content specialists."

"The President essentially bribed states into implementation, offering 4.35 billion taxpayer dollars."

I have been fortunate to have had incredible educators who opened my eyes to the joy of learning. These standards mistrust teachers. Teaching is about interaction between teachers and students. There is no control in this model for students' participation or interest!

Standards based education is all about bureaucratic convenience.

Why don't we just manufacture robots, instead of students? They last longer, and they always do what they're told! (I've got news for you, son, that IS the plan!)

Creativity, appreciation, inquisitiveness: these are impossible to scale! They are the purpose of education!