Corrupt to the Core: What is Common Core and How does it Threaten the Next Generation

By: American Decency Staff

By Chris Johnson

Educate.  The word itself comes from the Latin “ex ducere ” – to bring out or lead forth. Lead forth or bring out from what?  The etymology gives the idea of a rescue or liberation of the one being educated. Indeed, that is the basis of Western Civilization – that liberty is built on knowledge and the more you know, the freer you are.

It is ironic, then, that the latest push in education from the federal government is such a threat to personal freedom.

You have perhaps heard whisperings of the “Common Core” curriculum being adopted by most states for their public and charter schools. On its face it sounds like a good idea – a national standard of knowledge that every school kid in the country will be expected to meet by the time he or she reaches college age. It’s just that the people who developed, paid for, and pushed the curriculum all have much more than that in mind.

The most obvious problem with Common Core is the centralization of power in the education system. If a parent has a problem with what their child is being taught, they could not join a group of concerned parents and bring the problem to the school board. It would be equally useless to lobby the state board of education. In order for a parent to have any effect on what their child is being taught, they would have to find thousands of parents around the country with which to network and then just hope that the powerful developers of the curriculum could be brought around to their point of view.

And, unfortunately, homeschooling or private schooling will most likely not provide an escape from the long reaching arm of the Common Core, as it will require students to pass a particular test to graduate in the states which adopt it. Thus, students will have to be taught the “correct” answers to those tests, even on issues like global warming and government healthcare.

Is a parent’s right to oversee their child’s education a worthy trade for that child being prepared to enter a prestigious institution of higher learning? It is an irrelevant question, as Common Core reportedly is not designed to prepare kids for an Ivy League school, or even a four-year college, but for a two year community college.

In fact, the standard required by the Common Core is lower than that of many state’s current standards. From StopCommonCore.com, an excellent resource for those wanting to dig deeper into Common Core’s frightening consequences, “Dr. James Milgram, the only mathematician on the Common Core Validation Committee, refused to sign off on the math standards because he concluded that by eighth grade, they would place our students about two years behind those of the highest-achieving countries.”

It will, in fact, hold the teaching of Algebra I back to 9^th grade, rather than the more common practice of teaching it in 8^th grade; adopt an experimental method of teaching geometry; ”[ fail] to teach prime factorization, and therefore [fail] to teach common denominators; [postpone] fluency with division from grade 5 to grade 6 (in contrast to high-performing countries such as Singapore and South Korea);  [fail] to teach conversions between fractions, decimals, and percents; [redefine] algebra as “functional algebra” that de-emphasizes algebraic manipulation; and [exclude] some algebra II and geometry content that is a prerequisite at almost every four-year state college.”

As for the Core’s English standards (also from StopCommonCore.com), “the most serious problem with Common Core’s ELA standards isn’t the reading levels of the literature – it’s the de-emphasis on literature, period. Common Core emphasizes “informational texts” to the detriment of creative literature. This means the Standards dictate that students spend most of their time – 70% — reading nonfictionsuch as technical manuals and court decisions. Although the Standards commentary claims that this 70% covers all subject areas, not just English, the drafters clearly recommend that at least 50% of the reading material within the English class should be nonfiction informational text, not classic literature.”

­­­­­­­As reported by the Daily Caller, here are a few fascinating samples of the reading list,

• “Invasive Plant Inventory,” by the California Invasive Plant Council. This is just a list of invasive plant species in California.
• “Executive Order 13423: Strengthening Federal Environmental, Energy, and Transportation Management,” by the U.S. General Services Administration. The executive order was made under President Bush’s administration, and calls for efficiency and sustainability to be driving motivations in resource management.
• “Recommended Levels of Insulation,” by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
• “FedViews,” by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. This report from 2009 explains that the federal stimulus helped to stabilize the economy and asserts that there is no link between deficit spending and inflation.

As you can see, far from striving to produce creative, curious, and thoughtful students, the Core seems more set up to produce cogs in the machine of the national economy.

But even this is not the most concerning aspect of Common Core. A key aspect of the Common Core program is collecting data on the student level from kindergarten through college. This means that at any time during your child’s education, a teacher or administrator or anyone with access to the database could type in your child’s student ID and look up the child’s performance in past grades, or how often he/ she was absent, or why the child visited the school nurse.

That would be the same database described by Reutersthis way in March, “In operation just three months, the database already holds files on millions of children identified by name, address and sometimes social security number. Learning disabilities are documented, test scores recorded, attendance noted. In some cases, the database tracks student hobbies, career goals, attitudes toward school – even homework completion.

Local education officials retain legal control over their students' information. But federal law allows them to share files in their portion of the database with private companies selling educational products and services.

Let me speak my mind for a minute here. I have never been a conspiracy theorist. I like to assume the best of people and it is very important to me to verify any accusations, especially of people I don’t like, with credible, iron clad sources. So I am not prepared to report to you that the government is trying to do anything more sinister than collect data to (misguidedly) benefit future students’ chances in life.

What should be obvious, owever, is that such a database creates a horrific opportunity for abuse down the road. Whether by our current president or by some even more left-wing, big-government administration in the future, a database categorizing America’s students in such a manner is ripe for exploitation -especially in a world where, as one National Security Agency whistleblower claims according to BusinessInsider.com, “the NSA has been conducting comprehensive surveillance on U.S. citizens for more than a decade.”  (The chief of the NSA denieshaving this ability or any motivation to do so.)

It’s hard to imagine the United States of America keeping or using such records against her citizens, but when the IRS is targeting the president’s opponents and the DOJ is flipping through the Associated Press’s phone records, maybe my imagination starts to wander.

What we can be sure of is that Common Core is not as innocuous as it sounds. It should have parents’ attention and concern around the country. I would encourage you to delve deeper into the subject at StopCommonCore.com

 

 

 

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