Teach Common Sense not Common Core

Canada Free Press – by Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh

“Common Core will be raising good little socialists, who are in tune with their feelings, not so much their critical thinking skills.”  – Author unknown

I have seen many educational fads come and go, trying to replace teaching methodology in our public schools with something so revolutionary and never tried before that would make teaching a “science” instead of an art and to place all children into a national standardized one mold fits all in spite of the human variability in intelligence, talent, aptitude, ability, and the desire to learn. All these fads were driven by the Department of Education’s intention to fund new research that justified its existence and the college professors of education who were under the threat of “publish or perish” when it came to obtaining the very sought-after tenure – life employment without dismissal for cause. Education grew more and more liberal, infusing non-science subjects with Chavezism, Castroism, Maoism, Stalinism, feminism, racism, socialism, and communism.  

Why are we then sending our kids to college, borrowing the money we don’t have, knowing that the kids won’t be able to pay it back when they can’t find a job because the jobs don’t exist, the economy is in shambles? Why are we allowing these degenerate college professors many of whom hate America and what it stands for to destroy the minds of our children and reshape them in the vision of their professors’ ideology?

Common Core, the brainchild and work of 30 individuals under the aegis of the Governors’ Association and the almost $200 million sponsorship of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is something else. It is the tool to achieve the “fundamental transformation” of our society as promised in 2008. It is nationalized education “standards” that require students to find another way to reach an answer, particularly in math, even if the answer is wrong, justifying the incorrect answer as the path to help students learn to think critically. This would probably happen right after the student is turned off to math or he/she reaches the right developmental age to think analytically and critically.

A simple addition, 17+25=42, elicited the following response from a second grader in San Jose who was using the GO Math! Curriculum of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, aligned with the Common Core standards, “I got the assignment by talking in my brain and I agreed of the answer that my brain got.”

Here is another simple math problem that a third grader should be able to solve immediately, 26+17=43. In the Common Core new, perplexing, and convoluted way of thinking, the problem is resolved this way:

“Add 26+17 by breaking apart numbers to make a 10.
Use a number that adds with the 6 in 26 to make a 10.
Since 6+4=10, use 4.
Think: 17=4+13
Add 26+4=30
Add 30+13=43
So, 26+17= 43”

If you are dumbfounded by this kind of stressful and irrational logic, you are not alone.

A simple subtraction, 243-87=156 done quickly “the old fashioned way,” turns into a complicated solution that requires strange logic and drawing a graph such as the one illustrated below:

Can we imagine now studying calculus and differential equations under such contorted thinking? But it gets much worse in reading, writing, government, and history.

A Common Core kindergarten problem instructs, “In each cube stick, color some cubes blue and the rest of the cubes red. Draw the cubes you colored in the number bond. Show the hidden partners on your fingers to an adult. Color the fingers you showed.” Aside from the fact that the problem is almost impossible for an adult to comprehend, it involves “cube sticks,” “number bonds” and “hidden partners.” The worksheet further urges children to impose this math concept on an adult.

Another example from the Go Math! Common Core aligned math curriculum involves Mina Boyd’s kindergarten child who was given the worksheet to Count and Write 20, presumably 20 apples that looked curiously like bombs. There were actually only 19. Was it a printing mistake or were the publishers having difficulty with this “transformational” math? One reader described the assignment beyond brainwashing – a form of Pavlov’s dog conditioned response, “neuro-linguistic programming, and otherwise known as hypnosis.”

A fourth grade reading assignment asks students to describe adultery, a highly inappropriate topic for elementary school.

Sixth grade students in Arkansas were given in 2013 the assignment to “revise” the “outdated” Bill of Rights, “suggesting that the government can grant and remove inalienable rights.” Middle School students were also told that the Second Amendment requires gun registration.

According to the workbook, “This amendment states that people have the right to certain weapons, providing that they register them and they have not been in prison.”

It gets even more interesting. The USDA is now in the business of nudging grandparents to use ChooseMyPlate.gov to help their grandkids eat healthier, and giving instructions to offer their grandchildren “hugs” instead of treats and to “read government bedtime stories.”

People like Jeb Bush and Mike Huckabee have constantly pushed the Common Core standards. If implemented, they are “designed to make the United States more competitive with the rest of the world.” How exactly would a dumbed down curriculum make children more competitive? Were we not competitive enough before Common Core? Was American higher education not the envy of the world? Why must we now destroy it?

Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education is running Common Core ads non-stop. Parents are waking up and garnering the support of some teachers. But there are powerful groups who are pushing Common Core because there is a lot of money at stake. Common Core standards are not a grass-roots, nor state-led initiative.  It is the Obama administration Race to the Top competition bribing schools with billions of dollars if they adopt Common Core. It is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, it is Pearson, the billion dollar educational publishing and testing conglomerate, the Center for American Progress, the National Governors Association (NGA), the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), and recipients of Bill Gates Foundation money who continue to propagandize Common Core.

U.S. News and World Report quoted Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers (1.5 million members), who stated that the Common Core implementation is ‘far worse’ than ObamaCare.

Money is no object when it comes to sending school administrators to a luxurious hotel and spa ($38,000) in order to discuss strategies for implementing Common Core standards at schools in the Inglewood, California impoverished school district that had to be bailed out in 2012 to the tune of $55 million.

The Daily Caller assembled a list of complicated, dreadful math problems and worksheets that are glaring evidence that Common Core standards are not really trying to improve our children’s education, but are hurting their education.

Common Core math standards are based on the theory of Constructivism. This theory rejects the drilling of children on basic arithmetic (addition, subtraction, multiplication). Instead, children are taught to “construct” their own way of figuring out an answer. An incorrect answer is acceptable as long as the child explains how he/she got the wrong answer.

The reading found in the English literature selections is not chosen for the joy of reading and learning, but instead, they are to be “analyzed and discussed by students using leftwing norms” of morality and behavior. This unproven theory of education is called New Criticism Literary Analysis.

Moral ambiguity, acceptance of perverse and aberrant behavior presented as courage, overt sexuality, adultery, and even pornography are some of the themes chosen for young and older students. For example, schools in North Carolina who adopted the Common Core standards are requiring the reading of the sexually explicit book, The House of Spirits.

Middle school readings include the complete United Nations Declaration on the Rights of the Child and the complete United Nations Millennium Declaration with the main theme being global diversity and global citizenship. Stories include head scarves of Muslims in France, an American teenager punished in Singapore, an arranged marriage in India, learning Japanese, an African novel, and articles promoting global warming as settled science. The readings indicate the progressives’ love affair with third world societies which they deem superior to our own.

Centuries of European and American civilization and culture are glossed over. The few stories devoted to American culture include a kid who tries to avoid parental punishment for breaking curfew, Halloween, and a controversy over sea lions in Oregon.

The Eagle Forum described some of the reading materials aligned with Common Core. The common denominators are anti-Americanism, sexuality, porn, and global warming:

• Dreaming in Cuban by Cristina Garcia (10th grade reading, anti-American and sexually explicit)
• Black Swan Green by David Mitchell (9th grade, a 13-year old boy describing his father’s genitals and a sex act)
• Wind Power (k-1, telling children their electricity comes from wind mills)
• Ted the Fly Guy (k-1, cartoon characters with large eyes)
• Where Do Polar Bears Live? by Sarah Thomson (2nd and 3rd graders, global warming, climate change, carbon foot print)
• Sorry, Wrong Number by Lucille Fletcher (4th and 5th graders, woman learns of her own murder plot when phone wires get crossed; is this the kind of reading appropriate for 9 and 10 year olds?)
• English language arts lesson plans for 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders based on the book, Barack Obama: Son of Promise, Child of Hope, portray President Obama as a “messianic figure,” clearly a propaganda effort to align ideology with Common Core
• Common Core Anti-American teaching guides produced by Zaner-Bloser company

1. Two-week lesson for 4th graders using the book The Jacket indoctrinates children into the concept of racism and white privilege; the left-wing concept that the values of
2. American society are designed to benefit white people to the exclusion of black people

Another Zaner-Bloser guide uses the book Harvesting Hope: The Story of Cesar Chavez, to indoctrinate 2nd graders into the founder of the United Farm Workers union and “equality.” The conditions of the farmers and the landowners are presented on opposite pages, instructing teachers to say, “Fairness and equality exist when the scales are balanced” and “unfairness and inequality exist when the scales are weighted heavily on one side and are out of balance.” Do 7 year olds understand economics and property rights? Do they understand that first generation Americans came to this country with the clothes on their backs to escape poverty and religious persecution, worked very hard and made a better life for themselves and their children? (

EAGNews.org

, 10-17-13 and 10-21-13)

“These lesson plans will indoctrinate students against the same American opportunities that allowed millions of immigrants to arrive here penniless, work hard, and achieve the American dream.”

Phyllis Schlafly explained that parents also object to Common Core for its massive data collection on every student in the United States, in-depth longitudinal studies from birth to college, an invasion of privacy, and the mark of a totalitarian state.

To make the Common Core more acceptable, some states are changing the name. Iowa calls it the Iowa Core. Florida found a more euphemistic name, Next Generation Sunshine State Standards. Arizona governor Jan Brewer signed an executive order to erase the name Common Core.

“Even under a different name, the Common Core Standards are still mediocre, at best, and continue to put American students at a significant disadvantage to their international peers,” Glyn Wright, executive director of the Eagle Forum.”

Should parents question the Common Core standards that are unproven and untested, they might experience what happened to the father who showed up at a school board meeting in Towson, Maryland, asking questions the board had not picked – he was forcibly escorted out of the meeting by a hired security guard and arrested.

The latest Common Core outrage comes from California. The Mark Twain School in Sacramento has suspended Katherine Duran, the mother of a 12-year old student, for 14 days in her home for “disrupting the school.” Duran’s son, Christopher, distributed Common Core opt-out forms to other students to take home to their parents. The principal confiscated the forms. Mrs. Duran visited the school and confronted the principal who then called the police. She was served with the two-week suspension order. According to the Blaze, the principal “sent police with a chilling note that contained notice of the two-week ‘Withdrawal of Consent’ as well as a threat of arrest should she violate the order,” including the legalese, “The District will seek reimbursement for attorney costs the courts may impose.”

In light of the recent developments in Scotland where a bill was passed that appoints a health worker to act as a “named person” for every child until the age of five, then to a council with teachers until the child reaches 18, parents should be concerned.  Conservatives tried to argue that such measures should have been taken only when the well-being or safety of a child was at stake. A Christian charity promised to take court action to overturn the law because it violates parental rights. The law was passed under the guise of identifying children with developmental difficulties and potential cases of abuse.

Michael Ramey, of ParentalRights.org, writing to his supporters, pointed out that “the legislation was specifically aimed at compliance with the radical U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child.” Where are the rights of the parents vis-à-vis excessive government intrusion?

American parents should better wise up before it is too late and they too will lose their parental rights because the government deems that it is better positioned to be mommy and daddy.

Note:  Michelle Malkin is informing parents that there is a Common Core opt-out form, courtesy of Truth in American Education. “You can exercise your parental rights to protect your children from the nationalized Common Core.”

Watch the recently released documentary on Common Core by Ian A. Reid, Building the Machine.

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/62219