The list of excellent articles about “Common Core” grows by the week. Here’s one from American Thinker’s Bruce Deitrick Price:
Common Core was sold to the public as a way to improve public schools. Arguably, it’s the opposite.
First of all, the people in charge have been in charge for 85 years. They have proved themselves to be architects of mediocrity and decline, nothing else.
Second, Common Core locks in place bad ideas that have plagued us for decades. Sight-words in reading, Reform Math curricula in arithmetic, Constructivism in the teaching of knowledge, and many other failed theories and methods beloved by left-wing professors.
Third, Common Core Standards give federal bureaucrats more power. Communities will have less flexibility. It’s everything a totalitarian government wants.
The essential flaw in Common Core was stated in 2010 by Gov. Tim Kaine of Virginia, a Democrat. According to the Virginian-Pilot: “Kaine argued that the federal rules for standards were focused on ‘strategies and approaches, not content outcomes.'” Precisely. The so-called experts love tweaking theory, not making sure that children learn.
Sixty years ago, the Education Establishment smugly bragged, “We don’t teach history. We teach children.” That’s the switch Gov. Kaine is talking about.
For thousands of years, schools were concerned with one thing: teaching content. John Dewey and the Education Establishment adopted the opposite approach. Content is the unwanted guest at the funeral. To hide the shift away from sound practice, public schools are adrift in a fog of propaganda and sophistry.
For example, Common Core contains one of the biggest flip-flops in the history of education. A few years ago, teachers were told to teach each child differently. Now the Common Core dogma says every teacher must teach the same things in the same way, across the country.
For a second example, Common Core is full of weird techniques. One dictates that children must read more dull instructional texts, not literature. But it’s stories that draw children into reading. (Look at what adults read for fun.)
A third example is called Close Reading. The idea is that children, many of whom can hardly read, will spend days rereading short, difficult passages. This gimmick covers up the fact that many children cannot read easy passages fluently.
A new book, Credentialed to Destroy: How and Why Education Became a Weapon, by attorney Robin Eubanks, “details extensive evidence … that education became an invisible and purposeful means of restructuring the West, especially the US, away from individualism and capitalism towards a more collectivist orientation in the future. A goal that guides the actual Common Core implementation[.]”
The fraudulence of Common Core was revealed four years ago, when the corestandards.org website first appeared.
Read more: American Thinker
