Common Core
At least one parent stood to express more targeted concerns. He was literally dragged and pushed out of the event. -Justin Katz
[Apr 2016]: With everyone being about four years into the implementation of common core curriculum which was built around the supposedly superior set of math and ELA standards that would make all children college and career ready, we would expect to see NAEP scores on the rise. However, the exact opposite is the case and the achievement gap is widening.
-Anne Gassel 
The 2015 NAEP scores were a political disaster for Common Core. Eighth grade math scores, for example, fell for the first time in NAEP’S 25 year history (down three points).
-Joy Pullmann
Researcher Ze’ev Wurman looked at several other indicators of student achievement and found none have improved since Common Core went into effect. In fact, SAT and ACT scores are slightly down.
-Joy Pullmann
Last week the Brookings Institution issued the preliminary autopsy in its annual major report on education. It finds that American children are receiving objectively worse academic instruction because of Common Core, in two major respects: In the increase in nonfiction their teachers are assigning, and in a nationwide decline in students taking algebra in eighth grade.
Further, it finds that Common Core has done nothing to help children learn more overall, which was one of its supporters’ major claims: “there also is no evidence that CCSS has made much of a difference during a six-year period of stagnant NAEP [National Assessment of Educational Progress] scores.”
-Joy Pullmann
One mother commented, "I went to elementary school in Poland during communism. This is exactly what I was forced to learn."
-Paula Bolyard
College professors are joining the ever-growing ranks of those opposed to the Common Core educational standards...
"This rebellion among Kentucky math professors is likely a harbinger of things to come across the nation," write Robbins and McGroarty. "By and large, professors weren't consulted before their colleges and universities signed onto the Common Core scheme. They are only now beginning to understand that Common Core will result in hordes of unprepared students showing up in their freshman classes, and that the professors will be expected to relax or suspend course quality to hide the problem."
-Jason Russell
“The Reason why I helped write the standards and the reason why I am here today is that as a white male in society I am given a lot of privilege that I didn’t earn.”
-Common Core Architect Dr. David Pook
A professor at Granite State College and chair of the history department at the Derryfield School in Manchester, New Hampshire admitted to writing the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts in order to end white privilege.
-Patricia L. Dickson
Common Core’s failure should indict every single Common Core cheerleader and prompt a revival of genuine education reforms we’ve known for decades would actually help children but aren’t sexy to the consultant class that makes a living as “education innovators”...
-Joy Pullmann
What do Sherman Alexie’s “Every Little Hurricane,” David Mitchell’s “Black Swan Green,” and Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” have in common? All contain scenes of overt sexuality, violence, the most vulgar language imaginable, or some combination thereof.
Oh, and all are required readings under the Common Core Curriculum Standards.
-Howard Portnoy
Liberal, Government, Incompetence, Education
For the third time in a row since Common Core was fully phased in nationwide, U.S. student test scores on the nation’s broadest and most respected test have dropped, a reversal of an upward trend between 1990 and 2015. Further, the class of 2019, the first to experience all four high school years under Common Core, is the worst-prepared for college in 15 years, according to a new report...
On the same day the NAEP results were released, the college testing organization ACT released a report showing that the high school class of 2019’s college preparedness in English and math is at seniors’ lowest levels in 15 years. These students are the first to have completed all four high school years under Common Core.
“Readiness levels in English, reading, math, and science have all decreased since 2015, with English and math seeing the largest decline,” the report noted.
Liberal, Education, Fascism
A teacher in Rapides Parish, in Alexandria, La., was “written up” for writing a negative post on Facebook about the controversial standards, according to Town Talk. “This is a hot national debate,” the teacher told the paper. “Why can’t I comment? I did not say a word about anything locally.”
State Led: Modernize And Rationalize ...
Supporters billed the Common Core as a state-led, technical, apolitical exercise that would modernize and rationalize American education.
In fact, even as most Americans remained unaware that the Common Core existed, Arne Duncan, the Obama administration's secretary of education, declared that "the Common Core State Standards may prove to be the single greatest thing to happen to public education in America since Brown v. Board of Education."
Yet in 2014, the picture looks very different. Indiana, Oklahoma, and South Carolina have abandoned the Common Core, and legislation to do the same has been introduced across the country.
Hate, Union, Violence, Government, Character, Threats, Education
Video surfaced on Thursday showing Michael Mulgrew, president of New York’s United Federation of Teachers, as he unloaded a hateful rant against critics of the Common Core Standards Initiative. “If someone takes something from me, I’m going to grab it right back out of their cold, twisted, sick hands and say it is mine!” Mulgrew bellowed clownishly. “You do not take what is mine!” The union boss also challenged opponents of Common Core and union control over education to a fist fight. “I’m going to punch you in the face and push you in the dirt because this is the teachers’!” Mulgrew threatened.
Scores Trending Downward...
You can see on NAEP’s charts that the nation was on an upward trajectory just prior to the introduction of Common Core. Since that time, the scores have been trending downward.
Given the hype of common core, these are not the results we would expect.
"Significant Negative Effects"
"Contrary to our expectation, we found that [Common Core] had significant negative effects on 4th graders’ reading achievement during the 7 years after the adoption of the new standards, and had a significant negative effect on 8th graders’ math achievement 7 years after adoption based on analyses of NAEP composite scores."
Environmentalist, Warming, Liberal, Incompetence, Narrative, Fear, Education, Demagoguery
A Common Core-aligned elementary school homework assignment in a Jefferson County, Colorado school district tells children that by 2512, Kansas will be an oceanfront state, that the “Smokey” Mountains [sic] will become the “Smokey” Islands [sic], and that a sharp decline in the human population will take place, all due to man-made global warming.
Opposition to the Common Core is surging because Washington, hoping to mollify opponents, is saying, in effect: “If you like your local control of education, you can keep it. Period.” To which a burgeoning movement is responding: “No. Period.”
-George Will
Liberal, Government, Incompetence, Education
According to Newsday, King defended his decision to immediately cancel forums near Buffalo, Utica, Albany, and on Long Island after receiving criticism at Spackenkill High School last Thursday. Parents and teachers expressed outrage at the state’s implementation of the Common Core State Standards and the standardized tests that are aligned with the new standards.
A Single Point of Failure...
... The study found not only lower student achievement since Common Core, but also performed data analysis suggesting students would have done better if Common Core had never existed ...
Liberal, Government, Incompetence, Sex, Degeneracy, Education
The New York City principals union has pulled a sexually explicit novel from its middle school curriculum that was recommended by the city’s Department of Education as part of its transition to the new Common Core State Standards. According to Phillissa Cramer writing at the blog GothamSchools, the novel, Make Lemonade by Virginia Euwer Wolff, alarmed members of the Council for School Supervisors and Administrators (CSA) who reviewed it. Union officials said the novel contained sexually explicit language and content.
Government, Incompetence, Character, Sex, Degeneracy, Education, Adult
Child safety advocates are fighting to reform the federal government’s common core English curriculum after parents complained about graphic sexual material in assigned material. Specifically, one novel on the Common Core list of recommended texts, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, portrays pedophilia in a sickeningly sympathetic light. Page 181: “The little girls are the only things I’ll miss. Do you know that when I touched their sturdy little t*** and bit them—just a little—I felt I was being friendly?—If I’d been hurting them, would they have come back? . . . they’d eat ice cream with their legs open while I played with them. It was like a party.”
The Common Core fails any comparison with the standards of high-achieving countries.
It Made Things Worse...
... President Obama brought us “Common Core”—a bureaucratic Washington-centric mess that never improved anything, actually made things worse and left us with the propagandistic nightmare we have now.
The American educational bureaucracy and mathematics...
Maybe the Soviet bureaucrats weren’t clever enough, because the American educational bureaucracy did ruin mathematics. That, of course, was accomplished via the 1960s’ “new math,” which has been reincarnated yet again in Common Core.
Those who didn’t subscribe to the new math teachings weren’t exiled to Gulags, but the kids who were taught in this manner failed to learn.
Self-Impressed Technocrats...
The trouble with the Common Core is not that it was the handiwork of anti-American ideologues or anti-teacher dogmatists, but that it was the work of well-meaning, self-impressed technocrats who fudged difficult questions, used federal coercion to compel rapid national adoption, and assumed that things would work out.
Government, Sex, Degeneracy, Education, Adult
A sexually explicit novel geared for young adults may be considered recommended reading by Common Core proponents, but Sierra Vista Unified school administrators have decided to pull “Dreaming in Cuban” by Cristina Garcia from its approved reading list... Here’s an excerpt of the book’s most controversial passage, taken from page 80: “Hugo and Felicia stripped in their room, dissolving easily into one another, and made love against the whitewashed walls. Hugo bit Felicia’s breast and left purplish bands of bruises on her upper thighs. He knelt before her in the tub and massaged black Spanish soap between her legs...
Liberal, Government, Incompetence, Oops, Education
Speaking on the evening of July 17 to a room of administrators and interested citizens at Grayslake School District 46, in the northern suburbs of Chicago, Curriculum Director Amanda August said that in the new system the correct answer is less important than “the procedure” of arriving at that answer. “But even under the new Common Core,” she says “if even if they said 3 X 4 was 11, if they were able to explain their reasoning and explain how they came up with their answer, really in words and oral explanations and they showed it in a picture but they just got the final number wrong; we’re really more focusing on the how and the why.”
In any event, the standards were not adopted by states after deliberate evaluation or public consideration of their merits. Rather, incentives from the Obama administration encouraged states to hurriedly embrace the Common Core.
-Frederick M. Hess
[Oct 2017]: Since 2009, the Gates Foundation’s primary U.S. activity has focused on establishing and implementing Common Core, a set of centrally mandated curriculum rules and tests for what children are to learn in each K-12 grade, with the results linked to school and teacher ratings and punitive measures for low performers.
The Gates Foundation has spent more than $400 million itself and influenced $4 trillion in U.S. taxpayer funds towards this goal. Eight years later, however, Bill Gates is admitting failure on that project, and a “pivot” to another that is not likely to go any better.
“Based on everything we have learned in the past 17 years, we are evolving our education strategy,” Gates wrote on his blog as a preface to a speech he gave last week in Cleveland.
-Joy Pullmann, "Bill Gates Tacitly Admits His Common Core Experiment Was A Failure"