Glenn Beck has been trying to warn us about his concerns about Common Core. I also read an article by Michelle Malkin about her concerns about Common Core. Malkin says she is most concerned about data mining. Conversely, I have been reading in the newspaper multiple articles about Common Core by Kaycee Eckhardt who has been trying to convince us how great Common Core is going to be.
What is Common Core? I wish I knew the details of the program, but my understanding is that Common Core is an education program that is being pushing on the States by the Obama administration under the guise of improving education.
Kaycee is pretty much convinced that Common Core is a big improvement because the education system is already such a mess. Listen to her words:
Fact: Our children are not prepared for college. 2012 ACT date tells us that only 25 percent of students taking the ACT even pass all four sections, while 28 percent cannot pass any of them…
Our education systems come in 22nd compared to other nations-and this gap is increasing We are ranked 15th in literacy, and 24th in math against other nations.
I will not argue with Kaycee’s assessment that education in our nation is a mess. That is obvious, but I have a real problem with her solution. Again, here are her words:
The Common Core presents a powerful and viable solution: Educate all students equally, with the skills most necessary for them to complete internationally and perform effectively in a career that can support a family of four, or in a college trajectory.
Wait a minute. How did Kaycee come to the conclusion that replacing one failed federally sponsored program (No Child Left Behind) with another federally sponsored education program (Common Core) will fix the problems we are facing in education? That doesn’t make sense to me! This is another liberal smoke and mirrors kind of a deal.
George Will recently wrote an article titled Propaganda as pedagogy. Mr Will addresses some of my concerns about federal education programs. Here are some excerpts from his article:
The real vocation of some people entrusted with delivering primary and secondary education is to validate this proposition: The three R’s — formerly reading, ‘riting and ‘rithmetic — now are racism, reproduction and recycling…
Wisconsin’s DPI (Department of Public Instruction), in collaboration with the Orwellian-named federal program VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America; the “volunteers” are paid), urged white students to wear white wristbands “as a reminder about your privilege, and as a personal commitment to explain why you wear the wristband.”…
Today the school systems in 20 states employ more non-teachers than teachers. The Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice reports that between 1950 and 2009, while the number of K-12 students increased 96 percent, full-time equivalent school employees increased 386 percent. The number of teachers increased 252 percent, but the number of bureaucrats — including consciousness-raising sensitivity enforcers and other nonteachers — increased 702 percent. The report says states could have saved more than $24 billion annually if nonteaching staff had grown only as fast as student enrollment. And Americans wonder why their generous K-12 financing (higher per pupil than all but three of the 34 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development nations) has done so little to improve reading, math and science scores…
Heather MacDonald notes that in 2011, while the University of California at San Diego was pruning academic offerings, it created a “vice chancellor for equity, diversity and inclusion” to augment a diversity apparatus that included an assistant vice chancellor for diversity; faculty advisers, staff, graduate and undergraduate diversity coordinators and liaisons; a director of development for diversity initiatives; the Committee on Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation Issues; the Diversity Council; the Campus Council on Climate, Culture and Inclusion; and much more. Perhaps tens of millions could be diverted from progressive gestures to academic purposes by abolishing on every American campus every administrative position whose title contains the words “diversity,” “equity,” “race,” “ethnicity,” “sustainability,” “green,” “gender,” “inclusion,” “identity,” “interconnectivity,” “globalization,” “climate,” “campus climate,” “cross- cultural” or “multiculturalism.”
So George Will is telling us that education has become a propaganda machine and that education dollars are not being used to educate they are being used to indoctrinate.
This reminds me of communist nations both past and present that teach the children to spy on their own parents and inform the authorities if their parents say anything opposed to the beliefs of the regime. Are we looking at a time when political correctness will be forced upon our children? Are we already there? That scares me more than just a little bit.
I don’t think Glenn Beck’s and Michelle Malkin’s fears are the result of hyper-inflated paranoia so much as it is looking into the future and observing how this administration always lies to us upfront in order to hide their real intentions.
As Obamacare falls apart and destroys our freedom of choice in healthcare are we going to allow this administration to do to education what it appears they are succeeding at doing to healthcare?
The more I watch what Obama and his fellow liberals are trying to do to this nation the more adamant I become about the need to enforce the Tenth Amendment. Just to remind you. It states:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Education is not one of the enumerated powers granted to the federal government in article 1, section 8. The federal government does not have the right to control education. Furthermore, I believe the primary reason our educational system is such a mess is because control of education has gone from the state control to the federal control.
The solution to the education problem is to put the control of education back in the lap of the States and the people rather than pushing out one more “new” federal program in an attempt at fixing education. The federal solution always promises great results, it always also costs a lot of money. But each new federal education program is always more controlling and intrusive than the last progressive attempt to fix the problem. We don’t need more government control of education we need less.
Freedom is the answer, not totalitarian control of our lives in the health care and possibly soon the education arena. Please weight in. I need to hear what you think about common core.
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