Rotten To The Core - Michelle Malkin's Impressive Exposé Of The Evil 'Common Core' Nationalized Indoctrination 'Standards'
There are a few areas which are more important, in the long term, than the rest. Education is atop that list, in the long term.
The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution MUST be respected, upheld, and defended, if we are to avoid wholesale slaughter and enslavement by Marxists in the future. And the Declaration and Constitution make possible our resolving all issues with respect to national security, national defense, education, media bias & Internet freedom, religion & morality (including the sanctity of life and marriage), access to America's natural resources (including energy, water, and minerals), and a balanced budget/repayment of America's national debt.
The national debt, as currently constituted, arguably violates the thirteenth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America. How many times have we heard about this fact in the media, and how often is it taught in American schools? I would bet that not a single government school in any state in America has taught this truth...that the enslaving debt of our federal government has grown so massive, and constitutes such blatant inter-generational theft and enslavement, that it violates the thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America. What is our current tax code, if not involuntary servitude, the taxpayers being the enslaved, and those voting for, and relying upon, the fruits of others' labors, the slave-drivers?
But I digress.
My point is that education is the key, just as the Constitution, religious freedom and morality, and common sense are the key. And the fact of the matter is that education deals with ALL other issues, and touches upon ALL principles of government.
Education is the crown jewel of a nation's strength and potential, other than its people themselves. Education is more important to a nation's success than even natural resources. Education can either liberate and empower a people, or it can open the door to enslavement and oppression, to total tyranny, to dictatorship.
We all know that our government schools, which used to be called 'common schools,' have been used against us for generations. Now that we have a Communist in the White House, it's difficult to dispute the power of education, and its importance to restoring America. And Common Core is the Marxists' best chance of delivering the final knockout blow to America's future. Here's what Glenn Beck had to say on the subject on Friday morning:
If the people are unable to detect right from wrong, and instead are indoctrinated in Marxism, and don't have critical thinking and reasoning skills, they cannot understand what is happening to their liberty. If Americans want to avoid a dictatorship, we cannot ignore the fox in the education henhouse.
Common Core is something EVERY AMERICAN needs to know about. And every single one of our members needs to help lead the charge to not just reject Common Core, but to take back our schools.
Will you commit, right now, to helping your state take back education from the Marxists who are destroying America's future?
Here's the story from Michelle Malkin:
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Rotten to the Core: Obama’s War on Academic Standards (Part 1)
By Michelle Malkin | January 23, 2013 09:43 AM
This
year, I’ll be using my syndicated column and blog space to expose how
progressive “reformers” — mal-formers — are corrupting our schools. One
of my New Year’s resolutions is to provide you in-depth coverage of this
vital issue that too often gets shunted off the daily
political/partisan agenda. While the GOP tries to solve its ills with
better software and communications consultants, the conservative
movement — and America — face much larger problems. It doesn’t start
with the “low-information voter.” It starts with the no-knowledge
student. This is the first in an ongoing series on “Common Core,” the
stealthy federal takeover of school curriculum and standards across the
country. As longtime readers know, my own experience with this ongoing
sabotage of academic excellence dates back to my early reporting on the
Clinton-era “Goals 2000? and “outcome-based” education and extends to my
recent parental experience with “Everyday Math”.The good news is that grass-roots education and parental groups, brave teachers, and professors are fighting back. See the resource list/links at the bottom of this column and stay tuned for much more.
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Rotten to the Core: Obama’s War on Academic Standards (Part 1)
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2012
America’s downfall doesn’t begin with the “low-information voter.” It starts with the no-knowledge student.
For decades, collectivist agitators in our schools have chipped away at academic excellence in the name of fairness, diversity and social justice. “Progressive” reformers denounced Western civilization requirements, the Founding Fathers and the Great Books as racist. They attacked traditional grammar classes as irrelevant in modern life. They deemed ability grouping of students (tracking) bad for self-esteem. They replaced time-tested rote techniques and standard algorithms with fuzzy math, inventive spelling and multicultural claptrap.
Under President Obama, these top-down mal-formers — empowered by Washington education bureaucrats and backed by misguided liberal philanthropists led by billionaire Bill Gates — are now presiding over a radical makeover of your children’s school curriculum. It’s being done in the name of federal “Common Core” standards that do anything but raise achievement standards.
Common Core was enabled by Obama’s federal stimulus law and his Department of Education’s “Race to the Top” gimmickry. The administration bribed cash-starved states into adopting unseen instructional standards as a condition of winning billions of dollars in grants. Even states that lost their bids for Race to the Top money were required to commit to a dumbed-down and amorphous curricular “alignment.”
In practice, Common Core’s dubious “college- and career”-ready standards undermine local control of education, usurp state autonomy over curricular materials, and foist untested, mediocre and incoherent pedagogical theories on America’s schoolchildren.
Over the next several weeks and months, I’ll use this column space to expose who’s behind this disastrous scheme in D.C. backrooms. I’ll tell you who’s fighting it in grassroots tea party and parental revolts across the country from Massachusetts to Indiana, Texas, Georgia and Utah. And most importantly, I’ll explain how this unprecedented federal meddling is corrupting our children’s classrooms and textbooks.
There’s no better illustration of Common Core’s duplicitous talk of higher standards than to start with its math “reforms.” While Common Core promoters assert their standards are “internationally benchmarked,” independent members of the expert panel in charge of validating the standards refute the claim. Panel member Dr. Sandra Stotsky of the University of Arkansas reported, “No material was ever provided to the Validation Committee or to the public on the specific college readiness expectations of other leading nations in mathematics” or other subjects.
In fact, Stanford University professor James Milgram, the only mathematician on the validation panel, concluded that the Common Core math scheme would place American students two years behind their peers in other high-achieving countries. In protest, Milgram refused to sign off on the standards. He’s not alone.
Professor Jonathan Goodman of New York University found that the Common Core math standards imposed “significantly lower expectations with respect to algebra and geometry than the published standards of other countries.”
Under Common Core, as the American Principles Project and Pioneer Institute point out, algebra I instruction is pushed to 9th grade, instead of 8th grade, as commonly taught. Division is postponed from 5th to 6th grade. Prime factorization, common denominators, conversions of fractions and decimals, and algebraic manipulation are de-emphasized or eschewed. Traditional Euclidean geometry is replaced with an experimental approach that had not been previously pilot-tested in the U.S.
Ze’ev Wurman, a prominent software architect, electrical engineer and longtime math advisory expert in California and Washington, D.C., points out that Common Core delays proficiency with addition and subtraction until 4th grade and proficiency with basic multiplication until 5th grade, and skimps on logarithms, mathematical induction, parametric equations and trigonometry at the high school level.
I cannot sum up the stakes any more clearly than Wurman did in his critique of this mess and the vested interests behind it:
“I believe the Common Core marks the cessation of educational standards improvement in the United States. No state has any reason left to aspire for first-rate standards, as all states will be judged by the same mediocre national benchmark enforced by the federal government. Moreover, there are organizations that have reasons to work for lower and less-demanding standards, specifically teachers unions and professional teacher organizations. While they may not admit it, they have a vested interest in lowering the accountability bar for their members. …This will be done in the name of ‘critical thinking’ and ’21st-century’ skills, and in faraway Washington, D.C., well beyond the reach of parents and most states and employers.”
This is all in keeping with my own experience as a parent of elementary- and middle-school age kids who were exposed to “Everyday Math” nonsense. This and other fads abandon “drill and kill” memorization techniques for fuzzy “critical thinking” methods that put the cart of “why” in front of the horse of “how.” In other words: Instead of doing the grunt work of hammering times tables and basic functions into kids’ heads first, the faddists have turned to wacky, wordy non-math alternatives to encourage “conceptual” understanding — without any mastery of the fundamentals of math.
Common Core is rotten to the core. The corruption of math education is just the beginning.
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A starter list of resources/background/related links:
Truth in American Education is a blog devoted to watchdogging Common Core across the country.
The MA-based Pioneer Institute is the leading think tank tracking and fighting Common Core.
Pioneer’s Jim Stergios has an education blog, Rock the Schoolhouse, on Boston.com.
Hoosier Moms Say No to Common Core is Ground Zero for the parental revolt against Common Core in Indiana.
Utah moms against Common Core have a great blog.
A Mother Speaks Out: Children For Sale – Guest Post by Alyson Williams.
Stanley Kurtz has written about Common Core at NRO here and here.
Mary Grabar has written about Common Core and Team Chicago’s lefties here.
Phyllis Schlafly, as always, sounded the alarm here.
This must-read piece by James Shuls connects Common Core, math corruption, and the need for school choice.
Heritage resources on Common Core.
Videos:
APP’s full video series on Common Core here. Here’s part one to get you started.
Cato’s Neal McCluskey dissects the Common Core folly:
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Rotten to the Core (Part 2): Readin’, Writin’ and Deconstructionism
By Michelle Malkin | January 25, 2013 11:10 AM
Here’s the next installment of my Rotten to the Core series. I’ll continue to post resource/background/activist links at the end of every post. See also the links below to my previous critiques of GOP-led national standards efforts and related posts on dumbed-down curriculum/Everyday Math.
There are many, many amazing grass-roots efforts in the states that have been gaining ground over the past three years and I hope to spotlight as many of them as possible. They’ve been in this fight a long time and their work is indispensable. It’s important to note that the Common Core cheerleaders’ claim that their agenda came from the bottom up is false. Flat-out false.
I’ll also be printing e-mails, feedback, critiques, and responses. Stay tuned, spread the word, get informed, and get active.
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Rotten to the Core (Part 2): Readin’, Writin’ and Deconstructionism
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2013
(This is the second part of an ongoing series on federal “Common Core” education standards and the corruption of academic excellence.)
The Washington, D.C., board of education earned widespread mockery this week when it proposed allowing high school students — in the nation’s own capital — to skip a basic U.S. government course to graduate. But this is fiddlesticks compared to what the federal government is doing to eliminate American children’s core knowledge base in English, language arts and history.
Thanks to the “Common Core” regime, funded with President Obama’s stimulus dollars and bolstered by duped Republican governors and business groups, deconstructionism is back in style. Traditional literature is under fire. Moral relativism is increasingly the norm. “Standards” is Orwell-speak for subjectivity and lowest common denominator pedagogy.
Take the Common Core literacy “standards.” Please. As literature professors, writers, humanities scholars, secondary educators and parents have warned over the past three years, the new achievement goals actually set American students back by de-emphasizing great literary works for “informational texts.” Challenging students to digest and dissect difficult poems and novels is becoming passe. Utilitarianism uber alles.
The Common Core English/language arts criteria call for students to spend only half of their class time studying literature, and only 30 percent of their class time by their junior and senior years in high school.
Under Common Core, classics such as “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” are of no more academic value than the pages of the Federal Register or the Federal Reserve archives — or a pro-Obamacare opinion essay in The New Yorker. Audio and video transcripts, along with “alternative literacies” that are more “relevant” to today’s students (pop song lyrics, for example), are on par with Shakespeare.
English professor Mary Grabar describes Common Core training exercises that tell teachers “to read Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address without emotion and without providing any historical context. Common Core reduces all ‘texts’ to one level: the Gettysburg Address to the EPA’s Recommended Levels of Insulation.” Indeed, in my own research, I found one Common Core “exemplar” on teaching the Gettysburg Address that instructs educators to “refrain from giving background context or substantial instructional....”
Another exercise devised by Common Core promoters features the Gettysburg Address as a word cloud. Yes, a word cloud. Teachers use the jumble of letters, devoid of historical context and truths, to help students chart, decode and “deconstruct” Lincoln’s speech.
Deconstructionism, of course, is the faddish leftwing school of thought popularized by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in the 1970s. Writer Robert Locke described the nihilistic movement best: “It is based on the proposition that the apparently real world is in fact a vast social construct and that the way to knowledge lies in taking apart in one’s mind this thing society has built. Taken to its logical conclusion, it supposes that there is at the end of the day no actual reality, just a series of appearances stitched together by social constructs into what we all agree to call reality.”
Literature and history are all about competing ideological narratives, in other words. One story or “text” is no better than another. Common Core’s literature-lite literacy standards are aimed not at increasing “college readiness” or raising academic expectations. Just the opposite. They help pave the way for more creeping political indoctrination under the guise of increasing access to “information.”
As University of Arkansas professor Sandra Stotsky, an unrelenting whistleblower who witnessed the Common Core sausage-making process firsthand, concluded: “An English curriculum overloaded with advocacy journalism or with ‘informational’ articles chosen for their topical and/or political nature should raise serious concerns among parents, school leaders, and policymakers. Common Core’s standards not only present a serious threat to state and local education authority, but also put academic quality at risk. Pushing fatally flawed education standards into America’s schools is not the way to improve education for America’s students.”
Bipartisan Common Core defenders claim their standards are merely “recommendations.” But the standards, “rubrics” and “exemplars” are tied to tests and textbooks. The textbooks and tests are tied to money and power. Federally funded and federally championed nationalized standards lead inexorably to de facto mandates. Any way you slice it, dice it or word-cloud it, Common Core is a mandate for mediocrity.
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Rotten to the Core, Part III: Lessons from Texas and the Growing Grassroots Revolt
By Michelle Malkin • March 1, 2013
Click here for full-size map from Common Core watchdog Truth in American Education
This is Part III in my continuing series on the rotten Common Core nationalized academic standards scheme. Read Part I here and Part II here. Read feedback/reaction from parents, educators and activistshere.
Here’s a handy primer on “How to Fight the Common Core” from Shane Vander Hart.
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Rotten to the Core, Part III: Lessons from Texas and the Growing Gr...
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2013
Texas is a right-minded red state, where patriotism is still a virtue and political correctness is out of vogue. So how on earth have left-wing educators in public classrooms been allowed to instruct Lone Star students to dress in Islamic garb, call the 9/11 jihadists “freedom fighters” and treat the Boston Tea Party participants as “terrorists”?
Here’s the dirty little secret: Despite the best efforts of vigilant parents, teachers and administrators committed to academic excellence, progressive activists reign supreme in government schools.
That’s because curriculum is king. The liberal monopoly on the modern textbook/curricular market remains unchallenged after a half-century. He who controls the textbooks, teaching guides and tests controls the academic agenda.
That is how the propagandistic outfitting of students in Islamic garb came to pass in the unlikely setting of the conservative Lumberton, Texas, school district. As Fox News reporter Todd Starnes noted this week, a 32-year veteran of the high school led a world geography lesson on Islam in which hijab-wrapped students were banned from using the words “suicide bomber” and “terrorist” to describe Muslim mass murderers in favor of the term“freedom fighter.”
Madelyn LeBlanc, one of the students in the class, “told Fox News that it was clear her teacher was very uncomfortable lecturing the students. ‘I do have a lot of sympathy for her. … At the very beginning, she said she didn’t want to teach it, but it was in the curriculum.’”
But the headline-grabbing injection of moral equivalence into social studies and American history is just the tip of the education iceberg.
Top-down federalized “Common Core” standards are now sweeping the country. It’s important to remember that while teachers-union control freaks are on board with the Common Core regime, untold numbers of rank-and-file educators are just as angered and frustrated as parents about the Big Ed power grab. The program was concocted not at the grassroots level, but by a bipartisan cabal of nonprofits (led by lobbyists for the liberal Bill Gates Foundation), statist business groups and hoodwinked Republican governors. As I’ve reported previously, this scheme, enabled by the Obama administration’s “Race to the Top” funding mechanism, usurps local autonomy in favor of lesson content and pedagogical methods.
One teacher described a thought-control training seminar in her school district titled “Making the Common Core Come Alive.” A worksheet labeled “COMMON CORE MIND SHIFTS” included the following rhetorical muck:
—The goal of curriculum should not be the coverage of content, but rather the discovery of content. … If done well, Common Core will elevate our teaching to new heights, and emphasize the construction of meaning, while deepening our understanding of our students.”
—”In our classrooms, it is the students’ voices, not the teachers’, that are heard.”
Blah, blah, blah. In practice, Common Core evades transparency by peddling shoddy curricular material authored by anonymous committees. It promotes faddish experiments masquerading as “world-class” math and reading goals. Instead of raising expectations, Common Core is a Trojan horse for lowering them. California, for example, is now citing Common Core as a rationale for abandoning algebra classes for 8th graders. Common Core’s “constructivist” approach to reading is now the rationale for abandoning classic literature for “informational texts.” [See Dr. Sandra Stotsky's alternative English language standards here, which she is offering to any school district/educators for free.]
Claims that Common Core bubbled up from the states are bass-ackward. A shady nonprofit group called “Achieve Inc.” stocked with federal-standards advocates who’ve been around since the Clinton years, designed the materials. They were rubber-stamped by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and subsidized by the Gates Foundation. [See the Pioneer Institute here for background on how the money game works and how some conservative groups have been duped/bought off.]
In states like Texas, which rejected Common Core, similar secretive alliances prevail. The Texas Education Service Center Curriculum Collaborative, a nonp... now used in 80 percent of the state’s schools. The state Board of Education, local schools and parents were denied access to the online CSCOPE curriculum database — which was exempted from disclosure rules. In fact, dissemination of the lessons was considered a crime until earlier this month. Only after parents and teachers across the state blew the whistle on radical CSCOPE lesson plans (including designing a new flag for a socialist lesson) did the state take steps to rein in the CSCOPE zealots.
Grassroots activists in Indiana, Alabama, Utah and nearly a dozen other states are now educating themselves and their state legislatures about the centralized education racket, whether it’s under the guise of Common Core or any other name. Last week, in response to a passionate parent-driven protest, the Indiana state Senate passed legislation to halt Common Core impleme.... Anti-Common Core bills are moving through the Alabama state legislature, where lawmakers are especially concerned about how Common Core’s intrusive database gathering would violate student privacy.
As Texas goes, so goes the nation. The fight against the federalization of academic standards is a national education Alamo.
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