9 Years Into Common Core, Test Scores Are Down, Indoctrination Up Common Core sucked all the energy, money, and motivation right out of desperately needed potential reforms to U.S. public schools for a decade, and for nothing. By Joy Pullmann November 5, 2018 It’s been about nine years since the Obama administration lured states into adopting Common Core sight unseen, with promises it would improve student achievement. Like President Obama’s other big promises — “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor” — this one’s been proven a scam. “If you set and enforce rigorous and challenging standards and assessments; if you put outstanding teachers at the front of the classroom; if you turn around failing schools — your state can win a Race to the Top grant that will not only help students outcompete workers around the world, but let them fulfill their God-given potential,” President Obama said in July 2009. He went on to state his faith that Common Core — at that point unwritten — would “not only make America’s entire education system the envy of the world, but we will launch a Race to the Top that will prepare every child, everywhere in America, for the challenges of the 21st century.” Race to the Top was a $4 billion money pot inside the 2009 stimulus that helped bribe states into Common Core. So here we are, nine years later. Common Core has been officially rolled out into U.S. public and even many private schools for at least three to five years now. Are American children increasingly prepared for the “the challenges of the 21st century”? We’re actually seeing the opposite. They’re increasingly less prepared. And there’s mounting evidence that Common Core deserves some of the blame. Student Achievement Largely Down or Flat ACT scores released earlier this month show that students’ math achievement is at a 20-year low. The latest English ACT scores are slightly down since 2007, and students’ readiness for college-level English was at its lowest level since ACT’s creators began measuring that item, in 2002. Students’ preparedness for college-level math is at its lowest point since 2004. SAT scores also dropped post-Common Core until it fully implemented a new version tailored for Common Core. How convenient. Even after the test was overhauled to match Common Core, average test scores increased by 0.7 percent in the most recent results. It represents almost no difference to pre-Common Core results, and the public can’t know exactly how the scores were recentered and altered, either. In all the previous SAT overhauls, average scores technically went up but statistical analyses show they’ve actually been steadily losing ground over the past 60 years. In other words, the SAT has a history of score inflation, and Common Core is doing nothing to reverse that. Almost a year ago I wrote about the latest round of international tests that publish every five years. They showed U.S. fourth graders declining on reading achievement. The 2015 results on the most reliable nationwide U.S. test showed the “first ever significant decline of 2-3 points – about a quarter of a grade-level worth – in mathematics at both grades 4 and 8, and in grade 4 reading.” The next iteration of that test showed no gains again. During the Obama administration, writes Harvard professor Paul Peterson, “No substantively significant nationwide gains were registered for any of the three racial and ethnic groupings in math or reading at either 4th or 8th grade.” They Told Us Common Core Would Fix This Problem We were promised that Common Core would reverse these trends. Think tankers Michael Petrilli and Robert Pondiscio wrote to West Virginians in 2015 that “The Common Core should help to boost college readiness — and college completion — by significantly raising expectations.” Jeb Bush wrote in National Review in 2013, “To compete with the rest of the world, we must produce competitive high-school graduates. That means we have to make sure that the skills they are learning are aligned with what employers and colleges expect high-school graduates to know…the Common Core State Standards, set an ambitious and voluntary goal line.” “If young people today are to be productive adults in the knowledge economy, they need standards that truly prepare them for college and careers,” Obama education secretary Arne Duncan said in a 2010 speech touting Common Core. “We will end what has become a race to the bottom in our schools and instead spur a race to the top by encouraging better standards and assessments,” President Obama said in 2009. “Standards” is jargon for Common Core. In fact, Common Core supporters used the same fail rates we still have almost a decade post-Common Core as a key argument to justify adopting, then keeping, Common Core. For example, Bush and former New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein argued in the Wall Street Journal in 2011 that Common Core would help address ACT data showing “three-fourths of the young men and women entering colleges ‘were not adequately prepared academically for first-year college courses.'” Instead, however, the evidence indicates that at best Common Core made negligible improvements, and at worst it’s reduced student achievement, all while soaking up huge amounts of time and money. The years of small but visible achievement growth under George W. Bush have been replaced by zero growth under and after Obama. The best evidence available indicates American kids have gotten all the academic boost they’re going to get out of Common Core already. Learning Hasn’t Improved, But Indoctrination Is Amped So if U.S. taxpayers spent billions of dollars and countless public employees’ man-hours switching schools to Common Core, what are we getting out of it? Certainly not academic achievement growth. What we do seem to be getting is plenty of political indoctrination. Just recently, Rick Hess and Grant Addison wrote about what’s happened to people who have worked for and led organizations that received millions from Obama’s Common Core grants and from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which also bankrolled Common Core. At its annual Standards Institute, a prominent conference to teach teachers how to teach Common Core, the organization UnboundEd “slathers its Common Core workshops with race-based rancor and junk science,” providing a “snapshot…into the ongoing transformation of ‘school reform.'” To keep their teaching licenses, many teachers have to regularly attend conferences like these for usually taxpayer-sponsored “professional development.” Nowadays teacher licensing mandates often specifically require teachers to learn Common Core-themed things. So basically, to keep their jobs, teachers have to learn more about Common Core. The Standards Institute helps them fulfill that job requirement. It did so this year by using Common Core as a Trojan horse to insert wildly leftist, arguably racist, indoctrination. Here’s Hess and Addison describing some of their materials: UnboundEd’s training in reading and math instruction is ‘grounded in conversations about the roles that race, bias and prejudice play in our schools and classrooms.’ Its Standards Institute prepares educators to be ‘Equity Change-Agents.’ To become one, participants are told, they must first acknowledge that ‘we are part of a systematically racist system of education.’ “If you are under the impression that there are good white people and bad white people, you’re wrong,” UnboundEd CEO Kate Gerson told the teachers this year, according to Hess and Addison. “Gerson informed her charges that racial biases are pervasive, universal, and something ‘you cannot be cured from.'” Gerson used to be directly employed by New York taxpayers within the New York Department of Education’s project to create Common Core-compliant curriculum, EngageNY. The curricula she helped create didn’t stay in New York, however. It’s reached across the country because the Obama administration funded it to create one of the few earliest available and widely endorsed set of Common Core-compliant materials. So if you’re a taxpayer, you funded this under the guise of Common Core. Funding Racism In the Name of Common Core Items from EngageNY’s library of Common Core curricula had been downloaded 45 million times by 2016. Education Week reported “44 percent of elementary math teachers and 30 percent of secondary teachers in common-core states are using materials from EngageNY.” After its $28 million in federal funds dried up (which only took a few years, natch), EngageNY’s curriculum bank was spun off into UnboundEd’s control. So this organization now peddling wildly inflammatory and divisive political views has affected a third to a half of the country’s teachers, all oiled by packs of taxpayer cash. “Once upon a time, Common Core critics were roundly mocked for fearing that the reading and math standards would somehow serve to promote sweeping ideological agendas; today, Gerson and her team are doing their best to vindicate those concerns,” write Hess and Addison. To be sure, American education’s mediocrity and politicization predate Common Core, and would be present today if Common Core had never happened. But we were sold Common Core with the promise that it would improve learning for American kids. Just as the few independent analysts predicted, despite costing billions of dollars Common Core has proven to be of no overall benefit to children, teachers, families, or taxpayers. Common Core sucked all the energy, money, and motivation right out of desperately needed potential reforms to U.S. public schools for a decade, and for nothing. It’s more money right down our nation’s gigantic debt hole, another generation lost to sickening ignorance, another set of corrupt bureaucrats‘ careers and bank accounts built out of the wreckage of American minds. Yet Obama went on stage last week and yukked it up about how Donald Trump goes around “blatantly, repeatedly, baldly, shamelessly lying.” The man who sold us Common Core, who knew we couldn’t keep our doctors and kept on promising we could, who lied umpteen ways to Sunday about his Iran deal and myriad other policies — he’s sure got a lot of nerve. And obviously not a lick of self-awareness, yet alone shame. Remember this utter debacle next time somebody comes knocking with the “next big idea” for your kids and wallets. Hide them both, and run the huckster outta town. http://thefederalist.com/2018/11/05...t-scores-indoctrination/#.W-BeDY0TDjM.twitter
But if what you're looking to achieve is a dumbed down population dependent on government to provide food, welfare, and shelter, just go ahead, fuck up the educational system and there you have it. For some kids, school should be an escape from the shithole environment they're living in. However, some schools have just turned into shitholes, too. A trap.
Common Core has a large number of issues including: It creates a new approach to teaching math which is not working out at all. It focuses on attempting to teach "themes and context" in regards to history. Facts and dates and names are not considered. Basically it is history free and fact free version of social studies.
Sometimes it's depressing to be right. Another decade lost to progressives screwing up the government schools to advance their own agenda. And isn't it odd how may of them send their own kids to private schools.
Thanks Obama! MADA! Making America Dumber Again.. Of course, this isn't a Left or Right problem. Both sides are fucking useless at solving the problem. Unfortunately, it's mostly 'progressives' who find themselves at the spear's head. And they are dull and fucking useless....
Nothing worse than being right over and over and seeing play out it slow motion. From Common Core to Obamacare we see the establishment lying for power and yet we have drones and foreign trolls falling for it. This is it in a nutshell. "Lack of transparency is a political advantage." "Call it the stupidity of the Democrat (decoded per Gruber) voter. "
Look how Trump benefited . As Trump Spreads A Fog Of Falsehoods, His Fans Believe Them And Make Excuses For Him From the greatness of his trade deals to the status of his ‘Great Wall’ to the real name of the Democratic Party, Trump’s lies are as good as gold to his base ESTERO, Fla. – Last Wednesday afternoon was typical for Donald Trump over these past weeks: The president was en route to a rally where he would let loose a torrent of falsehoods and outright lies about everything from trade to immigration to even the name of the opposing party. Just don’t bother telling that to the lady who wore the New England Patriots socks at the very front of the line to get into Hertz Arena on the outskirts of Fort Myers. Presented with a short list of Trump’s most frequent falsehoods, she countered with a homemade placard with a photo showing Louis Farrakhan with former Democratic President Barack Obama and demanded to know why the media wasn’t covering that. She added that she was not interested in whether or how many times Trump might lie that evening. “I don’t care if he sprouts a third dick up there,” she said. (She declined to give her name or to elaborate on her views of the president’s anatomy.) Her response, though, was typical of fans so committed to Trump that they take time off from work and spend hours in the rain or under a blazing sun to listen to his speeches. And it highlights the other half of the president’s destruction of the truth: As Trump has passed through the looking glass into a make-pretend world of invented facts, legions of his fans have happily followed him. Jennifer Petito, who drove across the state from Melbourne to see Trump, was similarly dismissive of proof that Trump’s claims are false. “I don’t believe that,” she said, joining in with the verbal assault on HuffPost for daring to challenge Trump’s version of reality. “I don’t believe he would lie like that.” Tom Nichols, a professor at the Naval War College and the author of the recent book, “The Death of Expertise,” said the Trump supporters’ response does not surprise him in the least. “There are a lot of scientific explanations for it, but most of them boil down to ‘shooting the messenger.’ Deep down, they know that these things are false. They don’t care,” Nichols said. “What they object to is the sense of inferiority created when someone tells them that the things they know to be false are actually false.” As those monitoring Trump’s speeches even casually have noted, Trump began ramping up dishonesties in service of GOP candidates about two months ago. The Washington Post found that Trump’s more frequent speeches combined with more prevarications per speech have raised his average number of false statements per day to 30 – making these past seven weeks a veritable festival of falsehoods. Trump supporters’ efforts to defend these untruths often put them in the position of denying the existence of any objective truth at all. Everything becomes a matter of opinion or perspective. Four days later and 600 miles northwest awaiting Trump’s rally at Pensacola airport, Gene Ponder, a high school government and politics teacher in Daphne, Alabama, wound up arguing that there was no real difference between having built a wall and falsely claiming to have built one. “It’s a matter of semantics,” he said, and pointed out that falsely claiming to have built a wall was an effective campaign tool. “It’s wonderful campaigning for the Republican Party in congressional seats around the country, to stimulate the base.”
The president’s proclivity to twist data and fabricate stories is on full display at his rallies. He has his greatest hits: 120 times he had falsely said he passed the biggest tax cut in history, 80 times he has asserted that the U.S. economy today is the best in history and 74 times he has falsely said his border wall is already being built. (Congress has allocated only $1.6 billion for fencing, but Trump also frequently mentioned additional funding that has not yet been appropriated.) https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...ding-claims-over-days/?utm_term=.aea6b9fd50cb Did he pass a big tax cut yes. Did the economy improve a great deal... especially in terms of jobs for minority groups and corporations. yes.. Are his wall funding ideas twisted yes... None of those lies compares to you can keep your doctor and that are health care rates are going to down. Obama lied his ass off... and his lies were not these white lies. Obama lies cost many of thousands of dollars every year. Trump exaggerates... Obama and the Dems Grubered you all and it costs us big.
Yes, because an education program founded less than 10 years ago certainly was the cause of adults electing Trump. Well done. You are certainly a product of Common Core math.