We Could Not Have Said it Better
We have to say Rich Girard is doing a bang-up job of getting to the root of many of the issues that currently concern the tea party on his morning show Girard at Large.
In particular, the question of Common Core comes to mind.
Our contention is that Common Core is no different than what is going on in every public school, regardless of what programs they use. Common Core is just another new name to obfuscate what many of us have seen as the obvious for years.
In this clip, Rich brings up to former superintendent Tom Brennan from Manchester, a writing exercise that is ‘Common Core-aligned’ aimed at children as young as six.
Every good teacher knows there are different purposes for writing… among them are fiction (reading for pleasure), information or instruction, (such as recipes, directions) and for persuasion (getting someone to see your point of view).
The question here is, what kind of persuasive writing is appropriate that does not use the children for political gain? Mr. Brennan did not seem to understand that instead of teaching sentence structure, spelling, and story structure, the exercise cited by Rich was purely centered around political activism of a certain stripe. And, this is exactly what programs such as IB and CC currently do.
A more appropriate subject for the assignment for six-year olds might be centered instead on how to convince someone that chocolate is the best ice cream flavor… NOT whether children should petition the government for more tax money to send to a foreign country or to have their parents pay to ban housing in favor of a park…
Brennan responded that the teacher would know the right thing to do and introduce a more appropriate example… If this is the case, what is the point of having Common Core-aligned lessons in the first place? Brennan also claims they only care about the basics of reading, writing, math, etc, but so far, we haven’t seen a lot of focus on ‘basics’ with CC. CC claims it’s not a curriculum, and won’t tell teachers what to do, but you can be sure teachers will be micro-managed in ‘best practices’ and in some cases even forbidden to teach things such as cursive writing, phonics, or to correct spelling. Learning will be done ‘collectively’. In some cases, a ‘collective’ grade may be given for a project. Is this how you think your child will learn?
Behold these eye-opening CCSS-aligned topics for teacher training for Common Core put on by the 2013 National Council for the Social Studies coming to St. Louis.
(Note: Who are the NCSS? Another NGO promoting their view of social studies, of course, that has no business telling anyone what to do in the public schools. Interestingly they were founded in 1921, just about the same time the Fabian Socialists decided to take over education for advancing their philosophy. This is an unelected private group being used to train teachers. What could go wrong?)
Can you say with all honestly these lesson plans being presented as good teaching by this private social studies organization are not blatant attempts at using our kids as political mules? Where are the real social studies here?
And sadly, after listening to all these folks do the two-step when questioned by Rich, do you mean to tell us that Mayor Gatsas, School Board Member Dan Bergeron, and current superintendent Dr. Debra Livingston all do not know what is really going on?
Related: William Ayers Staff at Achieve Inc Wrote Alaska’s Standards