Tag Archives: Common Core
At the Donald Trump Rally: “Let’s Talk About Rochester”
When Trump mentioned Bausch & Lomb and Kodak, I was reminded about seeing the adults in the neighborhood leave early in the mornings and come home from these workplaces, as well as factories like Bond’s, Hickey-Freeman, and Rochester Products. Most of these have either closed or downsized; workers in foreign countries now do the jobs my parents and relatives did. The neighborhood I grew up in began its downward slide with the 1964 riots. With the loss of manufacturing jobs, working class families fled not only the neighborhoods but Rochester itself. In my old “14621” neighborhood, the modest houses with neatly kept yards now feature trash and boarded-up windows. Continue reading
Catching Up with Some Common Core Profiteers, Beyond the Project Veritas Videos
The Big Government-Big Education alliance has also had positive trickle-down effects for professors, who have benefited with publishing contracts and grants for their institutions. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the biggest funder of Common Core, continues to support universities that help in implementing their education initiatives. Professors hopped on the Common Core gravy train at the get-go. There was the curious fact that Bill Ayers gave a keynote address at the 2009 convention of the Renaissance Group, “a national consortium of colleges, universities and professional organizations” dedicated to teaching and education. Now if we could only learn how much Bill Ayers was paid for that keynote speech in Washington in 2009. Continue reading
Common Core By a New Name and on Steroids, ‘Every Student Succeeds Act’
States must coordinate with eleven different federal statutes and submit their plans for approval by the feds. Statutes include “the Soviet-style Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act that’s designed to connect the K-12 education system to government-controlled workforce-development, the Head Start act that centralizes preschool standards, the Education Sciences Reform Act (which seeks to boost data-collection on students)….” Standards must focus on “minimal workforce-development rather than academic knowledge” – just like Common Core! States will comply or lose their federal money. The federal government will determine “college-and career-readiness,” thus continuing its power grab on campuses. Continue reading
The Common Core Fight, Part II: Small Victories and the Way Forward
In spite of hundreds of millions of dollars from Bill Gates and affiliated business and non-profit groups, and promotion by the Department of Education, support for Common Core among parents of school-age children is plummeting.
The Common Core Fight, Part I: What Went Wrong, What Went Right, and What to Do Next
The Washington Post reported that within two years of an organizational meeting at Bill Gates’ Seattle headquarters, 45 states and the District of Columbia had adopted the Common Core State Standards. President Obama, whose administration was “populated by former Gates Foundation staffers and associates,” was “a major booster.”
Common Core: Teaching to the New Test- Part III
Common Core basically is the “student-centered” learning based on the ideas of progressive education theorist John Dewey, and disproven by the numerous studies analyzed by Jeanne Chall.
Common Core: Teaching to the New Test – PART I
It took the sleeping giant a while to figure out what was going on with the Common Core (so-called) State Standards. Put together largely by a well-connected Washington, D.C., non-profit called Achieve, these education “standards” were attached to the Race-to-the-Top contest in 2009 for $4.35 billion in stimulus funds.
Be Afraid: Government “Help” for the Children
Ronald Reagan famously said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.'”
