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Subject:
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Common
Core`s real purpose;
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Date:
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Wed,
18 Nov 2015 15:52:34 -0800
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From:
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To:
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{Dumbing Down of course; Dumb Dumber Dumbest... And "Agenda 21" is just pure Jew-Communist Despotism, Oppression.}
Author on Common Core: ‘A Comprehensive
Dumbing Down of American Education at Every Level’
“The Common Core is supposed to be improving state
standards in education, but its bigger effect has been a comprehensive dumbing
down of American education at every level, from kindergarten through graduate
school,” Peter Wood, president of theNational Association of Scholars, said in an
interview with CNSNews.com.
Wood is a co-author of Drilling Through the
Core: Why Common Core is Bad for American Education,published
in September by Pioneer Press. The book includes Wood’s history of the Common
Core controversy and critical essays by more than a dozen mathematicians and
English scholars.
“The major criticism coming
from the scholars is that it’s lowered standards in both math and English
language arts, the two parts of the K-12 curriculum that the Common Core
covers,” Wood told CNSNews.com.
“When the Common Core was being
put in place, there was a large promise that it would be ‘internationally
benchmarked’, meaning the standards would be as high or higher than the highest
standards found around the world. And if you go into Common Core materials, you
will still find that phrase.
“But the math standards are set
way below all of the Asian nations, and the U.S. language arts standards are
not matched to international standards,” Wood pointed out.
“The section on math is written
by mathematicians who look upon the changes as a comprehensive lowering of
standards so that students at the end of high school know a lot less math than
they used to and are not prepared for college-level math,” he said.
Scholars also panned the
curriculum’s major de-emphasis of English literature.
“The teaching of literature is
not abandoned, it’s downgraded, so you end up with a very fragmentary and
impoverished view of what language can do,” he continued.
“The Common Core has this
peculiar emphasis that language exists to convey information. One of the
results of fetishizing information is that the texts get fragmented… and
there’s no distinction made between work of imaginative power and work that’s
purely utilitarian in order to treat everything as a kind of encyclopedia entry.
“So in your English language
instruction, you can and do get things like EPA regulations and repair manuals
read alongside excerpts of the works of Robert Frost and Jane Austen.”
“I started writing about Common
Core in 2009 before the standards themselves had actually been adopted and the
public backlash was something I anticipated because the public never got the
chance to assess it until after it was already implemented,” Wood told
CNSNews.com. “Bringing the primary stakeholders in only after the bridge is
built is highly questionable public policy.”
“The problems with Common Core
math start in first grade and accumulate from there. So the only way that
students who plan on getting STEM [science, technology, engineering and
mathematics] degrees in college can catch up is to take math instruction
outside their high school,” he noted.
“As far as English language
arts, it puts a big burden on families to introduce their children to a more
systematic and richer reading program than they’re going to get in school.
“I fully understand that not
every parent is in the position to effectively counter what goes on in the
schools, but the only option for most parents is Do It Yourself – teach it
yourself, find a family friend or hire a tutor who can do it for you. In the
meantime, cry bloody murder to your school board.”
Forty-two states and the District of Columbia adopted
“this breathtakingly comprehensive reform of our nation’s schools before there
were any standards that people could evaluate,” he noted.
“Now we’ve got the standards and the results of the tests that
go with the standards. And [National Assessment of Educational Progress] NAEP scores
nationwide show that the states that most strongly endorsed the Common Core
have seen some of the biggest drops. So the governors of many states are now
trying to dance their way out of a situation they helped to create.”
Wood predicted that during the
next three or four years, more states will become disenchanted with Common Core
because “it is way more expensive than advertised and the results are much
worse than anyone had expected.”
“Inventing a one-size-fits-all
curriculum for the country, pretending it’s a state-level initiative while
ceding enormous power to the federal government and private corporations that
actually run the Common Core, that experiment will wind down. It clearly is
something that the American public is going to resist tooth and nail, and that
makes it politically unsalvageable. But the costs of extraction are high, so we
will extract slowly instead of all at once.”
However, by then the damage to
the U.S. economy will have been done, he said. “To the extent that we’re a
nation that is in a tight competitive position with other developed nations
that depend on well-educated engineers, scientists and other technologists for
whom math is a basic tool, this puts us in a terrible position.
“Common Core will extract a
major price for the U.S. in international competitiveness, but it will be a
delayed reaction until the generation that has been Common Core-ized enters the
job market, at which time the people who invented it and the politicians who
implemented it will be gone from the scene and it will be somebody else’s
problem.”
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