corbett why common core must be opposed

| by James Corbett
| `BoilingFrogsPost.com `__
| May 27, 2014

“Felix made 8 birthday invitations with hearts. He made some more with
stars. He made 17 invitations in all. How many invitations had hearts?”
[`link `__ ]

“Irini has a favorite day of the week. She chose this day because it is
the only day that has an i in it. What is Irini’s favorite day? Show
your work in the tank.”
[`link `__ ]

“Make the sentence less wordy by replacing the underlined words with a
possessive noun phrase: The commands of government officials must be
obeyed by all.”
[`link `__ ]

These problems and countless more like them have shown up online in
recent months. They are examples culled from worksheets, tests, homework
assignments and other materials developed under the United States’
Common Core K through 12 educational standards, an initiative designed,
according to the Common Core `official
website `__, to
provide “a set of high-quality academic standards in mathematics and
English language arts/literacy.” Its critics, however, see it very
differently.

A lot of that criticism has been directed at examples of
overly-complicated, baffling, impossible or utterly meaningless
questions and activities that have been developed to meet these
standards, or on controversial statements like those of Amanda August, a
curriculum developer in a Chicago suburb who was berated for `seeming to
imply `__ that under Common
Core math, 3 x 4 = 11 will be an acceptable response.

Common Core’s defenders argue that the questions and assignments showing
up online are examples of individual school board’s interpretation of
the standards and do not reflect on Common Core themselves. They also
point out that August was not saying that teachers wouldn’t correct
students’ incorrect answers, only that greater emphasis will be placed
on showing the processes by which students’ deduce their answers.

More serious criticism of Common Core has been leveled at the standards
themselves and their development by a host of critics including
`professors of
education `__,
`mathematicians `__,

`former members of the Department of
Education `__,
the `largest teachers’ union in the
country `__,
and countless other professionals. Some of the most impassioned
critiques, however, come from the affected students themselves. One
notable example is Ethan Young, a high school senior who `spoke out
against Common Core at the November 6, 2013 meeting of the Knox County
School Board regular
meeting. `__

As Young mentioned, only two academic content specialists participated
in the drafting of the standards, and neither of them actually approved
the standards that were eventually drafted. Both specialists, education
professor `Dr. Sandra Stotsky `__ and
Stanford mathematician `Dr. James
Milgram `__, now travel the country warning
parents of the complete inadequacy of Common Core for preparing American
students for college entry or for the necessary skills to compete in the
21st century.

So if the Common Core is so reviled by teachers, students, education
standards proponents, principals and seemingly every other sector of
society with a direct stake in them, why are they being promoted so
heavily? Where is the funding for this initiative coming from?

Common Core has been developed with the `direct support of the Bill &
Melinda Gates
Foundation `__, which has
invested `$173
million `__
in the development of Common Core materials and promoting the
initiatives at the state level, and an `estimated $2.3
billion `__
in total funding related to Common Core standards development, including
grants for the `development of biometric
bracelets `__
that will `monitor students’ interest levels in
class `__.

If the interest that billionaires like the Gates and other Common Core
advocates displayed in revising educational standards were merely about
dumbing down the math and language skills of children across America,
that would be bad enough. But the ramifications of this process do not
stop at the ability to add, subtract, or spell. They go right to the
heart of a vision for society that was laid out over a century ago, and
perhaps most baldly articulated by President Woodrow Wilson in his 1909

`address to the New York City High School Teachers
Association `__,
where he admitted:

“We want one class of persons to have a liberal [classical] education,
and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of
necessity, in every society, to forego the privileges of a liberal
education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual
tasks.”

As educators like former New York State teacher of the year `John Taylor
Gatto `__ have `exhaustively
documented `__
over decades of study, the end goal of this process is and always has
been to prepare students solely for the purpose of being obedient
workers and citizens in a status quo owned and operated by the
political, economic and industrial elite.

That the conscious manipulation of the masses into obedient workers is
the real end goal of these educational “reforms” is made explicit in
example after example from the Common Core materials that promote blind
allegiance to and obedience to government in inappropriate and
`blatantly propagandistic
ways `__.

Everything you have been told about Common Core is a lie. It is not a
state initiative. It was not developed by educators. It is not going to
better prepare students for college or real world applications. It is
part of a century-long process of using the education system to mould
students into more obedient workers and tax cattle. And it is promoted
by billionaires with hidden agendas of their own.

After all, if Common Core is worthy of hundreds of millions of dollars
in direct investment and billions of dollars in indirect investment, why
doesn’t Gates send his own children to a school that actually makes use
of the standards? Instead, the prestigious Lakeside School in Seattle
that the Gates children attend does not mention the Common Core math or
language arts standards anywhere on their website, and `explicitly
states `__
that their school is for “more advanced” children and thus eschews the
standardized testing that forms the basis of the Common Core system.

As opposition to Common Core continues to rise and implementation
continues to proceed, concerned parents, students and community members
would do well to ask why Common Core is “good enough” for their own
children, but not for the privileged offspring of the Gates and the
other `billionaire oligarchs behind the modern education
system `__.