I’ve been doing radio for a while. I’ve interviewed a lot of people – Senators, Congresspeople, State Legislators, Governors, candidates for all of the above, Miss Minnesotas, authors, public intellectuals, fake intellectuals, Princesses Kay of the Milky Way, plate-throwers, journalists, bloggers, athletes, coaches – you get the picture.
And almost every time when I walk into an interview, I know more or less what I’m going to hear.
Now, I don’t normally do a ton of interview prep. I like to approach a subject from the same perspective that the audience has, from a complete white slate; it’s one of the best bits of interviewing advice Larry King ever gave. That being said, I’m rarely surprised by what I hear in an interview. I blog a lot, so I’ve had my mind on a lot of different subjects over the past 12 years.
But last Saturday was a huge exception. During the second hour on the NARN, I interviewed Linda Bell and Kirsten Block, from Minnesotans Against Common Core.
Now, I figured I was going to hear more talk about national standards. I oppose them, by the way – I don’t think the federal government should be telling the nation how to educate its children.
But it’s worse than that. In fact, it’s so much worse that for one of very, very few times in all of my years of interviewing people, I was actually dumbfounded by what I was hearing. It was so much worse than I – a cynic who expects nothing good from our national education system – expected that I was nearly speechless.
Standardized Poltroonery: If you listen to some of the GOP’s talking heads who’ve come out in support of Common Core, you might think that’s the extent of it; the idea that a national set of standards will help ensure that our children all get a better education (because that worked so well with “No Child Left Behind”).
It’s wrong, of course. When you nationalize standards, you accede to having them set via a political process, and political processes don’t work any better for allocating expectations in education than they do for allocating resources in an economy.
That, alone, is reason to fight the Common Core.
But it gets so much worse than that.
Orwellian: Indeed, very little about the “Common Core” has much of anything to do with “Core” educational subjects at all.
From the Fact Sheet at MACC’s website:
- It’s unconscionably intrusive: National student database – over 400+ data points collected (at a minimum – and likely many more). Medical Histories? Religion? Guns in the house? Bureaucrats’ impressions of your family life, gathered from mandatory home visits? On top of the Obamacare Health Insurance Exchanges, the NSA will be the least of most of our privacy concerns.
- We’re From Washington, And We’re Here To Get You To Shut The F*** Up: the program is mandated by the feds. Parental control? Parental input? Dream on, peasant.
- Richard Trumka Has Always Been A Great Man!: The curriculae for Common Core programs will be written by bureaucrats – not teachers. And not just the curriculum specialists who clog your local school systems today – the ones in Washington. Or the ones that work for the big textbook companies. Pardon the redundancy.
- Shakespeare Out; Ginsburg In: Western literature will be greatly de-emphasized.
- Ryan WInkler Won’t Be The Only Innumerate State Rep: The math standards are a disaster.
- Teaching To The Test Didn’t Work. Let’s Do More: One of the worst traits of No Child Left Behind was that it gradually drove teachers and schools to “Teach to the Test” – since the tests were the measure of achievement. Common Core will be worse – and thus, so will your kids education.
- We Had To Pass It To Know What Was In It: The State of Minnesota’s version of Common Core was adopted by the bureaucracy when the state wanted the federal money that comes with it, four years ago. Neither Congress nor the Legislature had the foggiest clue what was in it. They still largely don’t – which is why you see people like Jeb Bush supporting it.
Any school, public, private, charter or home, that gets any shred of federal assistance will be subject to the rules.
Common Core is an abomination, and needs to be repealed.
I’m a small fish in a small pond – but I will actively work against any and all politicians who don’t condemn and work to repeal the Common Core as it is currently slated for implementation; with the intrusions, the lack of local involvement, the continued centralization of public education (and private and home-schooled education, as well.
Whatever their party.
Until the discussion comes around to what do to with the empty buildings, people shouldn’t care what the government schools do; they’re a lost cause. If your kids’ education is important to you, they are already in private schools.
That works until you remember that common core is going to affect most private schools as well.
I’d have to have that explained. How do you force private schools to use government curriculum? And if you *can* do that, does it mean you can force homeschoolers to do it too?
Mitch, well said. My favorite part of Common Core is how a large portion of high school English class is supposed to be “informational reading”, highly entertaining documents like Executive Order 13423 and the IRS implementation of the Health Insurance Deform Act.
Yes, it’s appalling that President Blagojevich is setting up another NSA database with this, but shouldn’t we have compassion on the high school students that will be taking their own lives to avoid reading Executive Order 13423?
Swiftee; you achieve this by linking federal funding to state adoption of Common Corpse requirements. When states require the thing, private and home schools have to follow to a degree.
This how it’s done, Swiftee:
http://www.sfgate.com/education/article/Homeschoolers-setback-in-appeals-court-ruling-3225235.php
“Union Pleased With Ruling”
You don’t to delve too far into history to discover that the First Amendment was meant to protect churches and religion from being co-opted by the State, not the other way around. Liberals do everything backwards.
That interview was mind blowing. WTF are we doing to ourselves?
We are not doing it to ourselves, TFS. We are being colonized by an imperial state, run by people who have nothing in common with you, any American you know or ever will know.
They’re giving the test early so that in future years they can show improvements relative to this deliberately poor first year. It’s all about managing expectations.
Where to begin… I know the ladies you interviewed meant well. Just like Julie Quist and the folks with Maple River Education Coalition/EdWatch meant well ten years ago. The problem is this is the same crap that’s been going on for decades. Progressive education ideas have been infecting education since the 1920s. The federal government began its long march into education funding with the passage of ESEA in 1965. Ed schools, teachers unions, textbook publishers and school boards are all “co-conspirators” in the de-skilling and content-killing of education. Common Core is not a good thing, but its the same bad thing we’ve been imbibing for a long time.
And walk around town and ask people what they think about this. 1% may have some clue?
I audited an undergrad education class a few years ago. I was amazed at the huge academic & government apparatus that backs up our public education system. Every year tens of thousands of education and sociology PhD’s churn out thousands of scholarly papers on education in hundreds of journals, and it’s all paid for with tax dollars. If it never gets better, it’s not because we don’t spend enough money, time and effort on the problem.
“Participate in collaborative conversations with diverse partners about grade 1 topics and texts with peers and adults in small and larger groups.” This from the section of First Grade standards. Nonsense. Gobbledygook. Get rid of it.
For reference, here’s the HSLDA page on homeschooling in California.
http://www.hslda.org/laws/default.asp?State=CA
More or less, the court is looking at the code and explicitly stating that “capable of teaching” can only mean “holding a teaching certificate”, because obviously homeschooling parents whose kids average the 85th percentile are inferior teachers to government school teachers whose students score about the 40th percentle in California. And the Yugo is a better car than a Mercedes, donchaknow?
There are federal precedents that the HSLDA will likely use to smack down this court so hard it will make them see stars long after the Obama Presidential Library is built, to put it mildly. The stretch goal is not the repeal of this decision, but the disbarment of the judges.
a large portion of high school English class is supposed to be “informational reading”, highly entertaining documents like Executive Order 13423 and the IRS implementation of the Health Insurance Deform Act.
Ahhhh, the good old days of memorizng proceedings from the 12th Congress of the Proletariat to regurgitate at an oral exam in front of Party apparatchiks. Am I the only one who is wathcing Animal Farm, 1984, and Atlas Shrugged come to life here?
http://ht.ly/pcVmy
Common Core math – 291+354 has an ESTIMATED sum of 500. And the correct answer of 645 is a “reasonable” answer……
Cindy