Obamacore

This article is about the travesty called the Common Core Standards. Its design began before Obama was elected but I and others refer to it as Obamacore because Obama played a major role in imposing it on the country and like Obamacare it was passed without being read and it involves centralized data collection of private information. States across the U.S. signed on to Obamacore because they were bribed with stimulus funds. As parents became aware of the changes that were made to their childrens education many joined organizations to oppose it. Many insightful and alarming critiques have been written regarding the danger of Common Core. There are fears that Common Core is paving the way for indoctrination of American students by centralizing control of education collecting massive amount of data on students and telling teachers what they must and must not teach. There are reports that scores have dropped when the Common Core was adopted and that a curriculum designed to meet the Common Core standards would only prepare students for entry level courses in nonselective community colleges. James Milgram the only mathematician in the Common Core validation committee refused to sign off on the math standards. He said that Common Core math standards would put students two years behind those of high-achieving countries. He told the Texas state legislature that Common Core standards are in large measure a political document that . . . is written at a very low level and does not adequately reflect our current understanding of why the math programs in the high-achieving countries give dramatically better results." He said: I had considerable influence on the mathematics standards in the document. However as is often the case there was input from many other sources -- including State Departments of Education -- that had to be incorporated into the standards… A number of these sources were mainly focused on things like making the standards as non-challenging as possible. Others were focused on making sure their favorite topics were present and handled in the way they liked." Dr. Milgram added that it led to a number of extremely serious failings" in the Common Core that made it premature for any state hoping to improve math scores to implement them and that the Core Math standards were designed to reflect very low expectations. The Common Core standards are low compared to those of high achieving countries but a study by the Thomas Fordham Institute found that the Common Core English standards are higher than those of 37 states and the math standards are higher than those of 39 states. The reason for this is that states dumbed down their minimum standards so they could show they were meeting their standards and get No Child Left Behind money. Previously it was easy for a school to exceed the minimum state standards. Common Core imposes a low level curriculum on schools which dictate what to teach and what not to teach. Why are the standards of Common Core low when the ostensible purpose of Common Core is to raise the performance of American students? One can find the answer in a documentby the American Federation of Teachers which states that one of the goals of Common Core is to close the intolerable achievement gap between minority and non-minority students." Its much easier to close the gap by lowering standards than to raise the performance of poorly performing students and no teacher or school administrator wants to be in the position where their jobs depend on getting students to perform. There are ideological reasons to lower standards as well. Common Core instructions tell teachers to avoid giving any background context" to texts on the grounds that Common Cores close reading strategy forces students to rely exclusively on the text instead of privileging background knowledge and levels the playing field for all." The ideology reason given above is to level the playing field although the argument that leaving out background information will somehow do that is ridiculous. Those making that argument should be going to school instead of designing a curriculum for schools. Common Core tests do not emphasize getting the right answer. Instead they focus on essay questions which makes possible grading in such a way that underperforming minority groups score as well as high performing groups. The other goal of Common Core stated by the American Federation of Teachers is to help American students compete in the global economy. That raises the question Is the reason for Americas poor economic performance low standards?" Is Curriculum the Cause of Americas Poor Worldwide Education Rank? You can have the best curriculum in the world but if there is no discipline you cant teach it.A school staffer at Overbrook High School in Philadelphia told CBS that: Its mayhem. Students are in the halls theyre smoking in the bathroom; cigarettes marijuana said a worker at the school who asked not to be identified. We cant contain them and its really hazardous for us working and these kids are not being educated at all. Its a zoo in here. Parents really need to come up here and see whats going on in this school because its ridiculous Asian students who want to study are assaulted by blacks. In 2010 a federal judge found that black students at South Philadelphia High School had assaulted and harassed Asian students daily -- for years but the principal said she did not call police because she did not want to criminalize the black students. Laws prevent public schools from taking effective action to stop the violence. John Hood in an article for the Foundation of Economic Education wrote: A host of administrative decisions court rulings and legislative actions have created such a maze of regulations that school principals and teachers are often unable to exercise meaningful control over their schools. Furthermore the prevailing ethos" in the education establishmentmade up of researchers administrators and bureaucratsis suspicious of many forms of punishment and exhibits a fixation with sensitivity training" and building self-esteem among students." One would think that if the Obama administration was serious about improving education they would remove the regulations that interfere with classroom discipline. Instead in response to higher number of blacks being suspended than whites President Obama issued an executive order" which effectively placed quotas" on school discipline based on race. If there are more disruptive blacks than Chinese in a school and you suspend the blacks you could face possible civil rights violationcharges. I often walk by what was once the Irving School in New York. The discipline at the Irving school was so bad that pupils threw a chair out of a window and killed a woman walking below. It doesnt take a rocket scientist to realize that academic performance was unlikely to have been stellar at the Irving School. The performance of the pupils in the Irving school was low even by New York City standards; in fact it was so low that the Bloomberg administration decided to give the school an ultimatum. They were told to make curriculum changes and that if the scores of the school didnt go up theyd be closed. The teachers made the curriculum changes the students continued to fail and the school was closed. The school might have had a chance if instead of changing the curriculum police had been stationed in the hallways. The building that housed the Irving School now houses one of the Success Academy Charter schools. That school outperforms most New York City schools. One of the reasons it does is discipline. According to Insideschools.org Success Academy schools are famous for a no-nonsense attitude toward bad behavior. Defiant kids who dont obey the conspicuously posted school rules quickly earn punishments ranging from brief timeouts to school suspensions. There is evidence that American classrooms that are disciplined perform well. African American and Hispanic students have more discipline problems than white students. The filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan pointed out in the New York Post that if you pull out schools which are predominantly African-American and Hispanic the data show that the rest of the kids are being taught better in America than anywhere else in the world. The Common Core curriculum is likely to reduce discipline. The Common Core Curriculum requires that teachers teach boring informational texts such as long passages in EPA handbooks about insulation levels. Jeremiah Chaffee a high school English teacher in upstate New York wrote that he was struck by how out of sync the Common Core is with what he considers to be good teaching and that Such pedagogy makes school wildly boring." One alarmed high-school English teacher reporting on a Common Core training session that used the Gettysburg Address as an example noted that teachers were instructed to read the speech aloud to the class not as Lincoln would have spoken it with power and emotion but rather without inflection. A past president of the National Council of Teachers of English declared herself aghast at the vision of the dreariness and harshness of the classrooms the standards-writers attempt to create." If the creators of Common Core want children to learn they should be designing a curriculum that instills a love of learning instead of making learning an unpleasant chore. If they want disciplined classrooms they should make the material exciting. If the U.S. government wants Americans to be more competitive on the world stage instead of creating boring curricula its primary focus should be repealing laws that prevent administrators from bringing discipline to the classroom. Could the Goals of Leveling the Playing Field be Hurting American Competitiveness? Dr. Milgrams statement regarding how State Department of Educations lowered the standards of Common Core may be surprising after all one would think that the goal of Department of Educations is to see to it that students are well educated. The degree that other goals can take priority is illustrated by the story of the Shuang Wen School and the New York Department of Education. Shuang Wen is located in district 1 a district with many progressive schools with lower standards. I have included a table of ratings by insideschools.org of the performance of school in the same district as Shuang Wen in 2011 to show just how much Shuang Wen outperformed its peer schools.

School	Math	English
Anna Silver	53.2	31
Childrens workshop	56.7	50
Earth school	67.8	69.5
Neighborhood school	68.9	68.3
East Village	76.2	77.8
Shuang Wen	98.4	89.2

  Shuang Wen was a shining light in a mediocre school district. One would think that the city would have done everything it could to support that school. Instead the principal of that school was investigated more than a dozen times. I think that the high proportion of Chinese students in the Shuang Wen School and their vastly superior performance compared to schools with other minority populations sent a message the DOE did not want heard. It made the DOE look bad for the poor performance of other schools. It also sent a message that Chinese outperform other minorities and that didnt fit the ideologies of DOE bureaucrats. Since the DOE could not raise the performance of the other schools they leveled the playing field by bringing down the Shuang Wen School. Rather than admit that Chinese students as a whole were more hard working and respectful of their teachers and more devoted to education than large percentages of other minority groups the DOE blamed Shuang Wens principal for the inferior performance of the other schools of District 1. They looked for reasons to get rid of her and found ridiculous excuses such as her reporting students attending school when they left early in the day to celebrate the Chinese New Year. On July 1 2011 DOE marched into the school with the police. Trinh Eng one of the parents at the school told a reporter what happened next. One girl entering her 8th grade year at Shuang Wen was completely devastated. Teachers held each other and cried she said. When Principal Ling Ling Chou came out of the building a thundering spontaneous round of applause erupted amidst of shouts of Thank you." The DOEs hostility to Ling Ling Chou was so great that after parents put up a memorial poster in her honor on a wall in the school the DOE ordered it taken down. The principal the DOE hated so much had an extraordinary work ethic and devotion to her school. She knew every student by name and came in on Saturdays to tutor children who needed help. Students and teachers knew she cared about them and that motivated them. Two years later Shuang Wen is still a good school but it is not the great school it was when Ling Ling Chou was the principal. Perhaps Common Core could have been a great curriculum but because of the influence of DOEs and other groups whose primary goals are not the education of our children it is a very bad curriculum.   Is Common Core Data Collection Dangerous? President Obama and Arne Duncan have both said they want a cradle to career data system tracking kids.Attitudes tracked by Common Core include: 1. Political affiliations or beliefs of the student or parent; 2. Mental and psychological problems of the student or the students family; 3. Sex behavior or attitudes; 4. Illegal anti-social self-incriminating and demeaning behavior; 5. Critical appraisals of other individuals with whom respondents have close family relationships; 6. Legally recognized privileged or analogous relationships such as those of lawyers physicians and ministers; 7. Religious practices affiliations or beliefs of the student or the students parent Shocked parents in Illinois were asked to complete a Common Core survey about their political beliefs and told the Illinois review that they feared retribution against their children if they didnt complete the survey. The answers to these questions are stored in a central database. The fact that Common Core collects a lot more information than could possibly be helpful for improving the curriculum is raising concerns that attitude modification plans of the Common Core creators are not limited to motivating students and extend to indoctrinating students to promote their concept of social justice". David Coleman one of the architects of Common Coresaid he believes there is a massive social injustice in this country" and that education is the engine of social justice." Common Core Literature and Writing books by Zaner-Bloser teach social activism to 6 year old children in first grade. Children are taught how to manipulate others by getting them angry with emotional words. Reading about this I cant help but think how the Obama administration manipulates Americans with emotional words to get them angry at Republicans. An example that comes to mind is Obamas accusation against Republicans that they were holding the government hostage when they blocked funding for Obamacare. A similar example of public manipulation was when the Obama administration blocked access to veteran memorials in order to make the public angry at the Republicans.  The Common Core approved book Barack Obamaby Jane Sutcliffe indoctrinates children that whites mistreat black people and are racist and therefore didnt want to vote for Barack and only Barack can make the country better. The Common Core approved book Barack Obama Son of Promise Child of Hope shows Barack glowing with a heavenly aura. A Common Core lesson plan blames Islamic terrorism on low self esteem. The Common Core approved text book World History devotes an entire chapter to promoting the virtues of Islam and has anti-Israel propaganda spread throughout the book. State Rep. Ritch Workman told Fox News that kids are going to take this book as gospel and believe that Christians and Jews were murderous barbarians and thank God the Muslims came along and the world is great." The Common Core Science Curriculum teaches children that humans are dangerous to the planet that man made global warming is an accepted incontrovertible fact even though it is not and that government action is required to fix global warming even though the taxes the Obama administration would like to impose on carbon dioxide producers would have a negligible effect on global warming but would have a devastating effect on a crumbling economy. A February 2013 USDOE report that discusses measuring student attitudes beliefs and behavior lists desired competencies or improvement of attitudes such as appreciation of diversity" and recognizing bias in sources." From the perspective of the left wing originators of Common Core conservative view points are biased and of course this is what children will be taught. The Obama administration has already used the IRS to harass conservative groups which raises the concern that parents of children who lack sufficient appreciation of diversity might be harassed as well. One can imagine a scenario where a child who has some reservations about Islam is labeled racist and his parents are determined to be the source of his racism. Perhaps separation of the child from the negative influence of his parents might be seen as a solution to the problem. One of the reasons given for collecting data on student attitudes is to help improve their motivation. Studies have shown that students from fatherless parent families are less likely to be motivated to stay in school than those from two parent families. If the government wants to motivate students they are more likely to accomplish their goal if instead of collecting personal data on students they reconsider welfare policies that have been shown to lead to the proliferation of single parent families and antisocial behavior. Is a Single Curriculum better than Multiple Curricula? The final question I will consider here is whether one single common curriculum is a good idea. Students have different abilities. Some thrive in challenging environments while others perform better in more laid back environments. Problems of a single curriculum become problems for everyone and there is reason to believe that the experimental approaches of Common Core are problematic. Another problem of a single common curriculum is that it enables indoctrination by the Federal government on a massive scale as discussed previously. The focus of a good curriculum should be to teach critical thinking which is the opposite of indoctrination. How to Really Improve Education The first and most important step for improving education in the U.S. is reversing legislation that prevents discipline in the classroom. Attempts to level the playing field by bringing down performance of high achievers must be stopped. Legislators should not impose a common curriculum that makes all schools the same. Legislators should not interfere with school choice so that parents can use school vouchers to send children to the best schools for their children. Legislators should reconsider welfare policies that lead to badly behaved youth. Our government should step back and allow the free market of education to work without imposing restrictions on what teachers can teach and without passing laws that make it impossible for teachers and principals to bring peace to the classroom.