College students at George Mason University were recently shown the Common Core method- being taught to many of America’s elementary school students- for solving this basic math problem: 32 – 12 = ?
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Pence’s attempt to mollify critics by rebranding and repackaging shoddy Common Core standards is fooling no one.
Tuesday’s Republican primary elections in the Hoosier state resulted in the landslide defeat of two establishment incumbents running for statewide re-election. Pence had endorsed GOP State Rep. Kathy Heuer over challenger Christopher Judy. Pence’s Lt. Gov. Sue Ellspermann had endorsed GOP State Rep. Rebecca Kubacki over challenger Curt Nisly. The incumbents enjoyed the support of the Common Core-promoting U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
These same Big Business elites backed Pence’s ploy to stave off grassroots parental opposition by “withdrawing” from Common Core — and then immediately adopting “new” standards that recycle the same old rotten ones. (See my April 30 column, “Big Government GOP’s Common Core Rebrand Hustle.”) As Hoosier mom Erin Tuttle put it, Pence’s stunt “gave the appearance of voiding the Common Core, while the Indiana Department of Education and the Center for Education and Career Innovation walked it through the backdoor.”
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School officials said they will be rewriting a controversial essay question developed through the Common Core guidelines that asks eighth graders to consider whether the Holocaust a “real event” or “merely a political scheme created to influence public emotion and gain.”
From the San Bernardino Sun:
The district says the assignment is merely to teach students to evaluate the quality of evidence made by advocates or opponents of an issue. “When tragic events occur in history, there is often debate about their actual existence,” the assignment reads. “For example, some people claim the Holocaust is not an actual historical event, but instead a propaganda tool was used for political and monetary gain. Remember to address counterclaims (rebuttals) to your stated claim.
Wait, what? Since when do we debate whether tragic events happen? No one doubts 9/11 happened, or the disappearance of the Malaysian flight, or that Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans. Is this really “critical thinking”? According to their interpretation of the Common Core, it is:
The project was designed by district teachers and assigned during the eighth grade’s “Diary of Anne Frank” unit, according to district spokeswoman Syeda Jafri.
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By Karl de Vries.
Following a storm of criticism – and at least one death threat – a California school district Monday canceled a lesson plan that instructed middle school students to make arguments denying the Holocaust happened.
The assignment, aimed at eighth-grade students in Southern California’s Rialto Unified School District, sought to teach children to learn the nature of propaganda.
“Some people claim the Holocaust is not an actual event, but instead is a propaganda tool that was used for political and monetary gain,” the assignment said, according to a document posted by The Daily Bulletin. “You will read and discuss multiple, credible articles on the issue, and write an argumentative essay, based upon cited textual evidence, in which you explain whether or not you believe this was an actual event in history, or merely a political scheme created to influence public emotion and gain wealth.”
But critics said the assignment risked misleading the 13- and 14-year-old students into believing that propaganda about the Holocaust bears factual legitimacy.
“Whatever (the district’s) motivation, it ends up elevating hate and history to the same level,” Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the associate dean of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, told FoxNews.com on Monday. “We should train our kids to have critical thinking, but the problem here is the teacher confused teaching critical thinking with common sense, because common sense dictates you don’t comingle propaganda with common truth.”
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By European Jewish Press.
The US State Department is listed as a “cultural partner” of the 24th Abu Dhabi International Book Fair, which reportedly features a number of anti-Semitic publications. Books in English and Arabic listed on display at the Fair include Holocaust denial, Henry Ford’s “The International Jew” and Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.”
Also exhibited is “The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion,” the second most published book in the Arab world, which promotes the anti-Semitic notion that Jews are planning global domination.
According to the Book Fair’s official website, the US Department of State is among the event’s “cultural partners” along with Ikea, France 24, The National Geographic and the French Embassy.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper, Associate Dean of Jewish human rights group the Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC), urged the US to disassociate itself from the fair.
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In an epic rant on Twitter Monday night, Comedian Louis C.K. joined the legions of parents against the Common Core education standards. Here is what he had to say:
He shared some of the baffling homework problems plaguing his two daughters:
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Medical insurance and public education might seem to be two different worlds with different problems. But the proposed solutions by the left were essentially the same. Here are ten descriptions that apply equally to ObamaCare and Common Core:
1) Huge federal power grab: The obvious result from both ObamaCare and Common Core is that Obama and his Czars get a bigger government to administer, more money to play with, more jobs for their loyal troops, and more control over people’s lives.
2) Unresponsive to popular demand.:ObamaCare and Common Core were massive, top-down interventions demanded by leftwing politics and ideology, not something the public asked for. Alleged problems were used as an excuse for adopting solutions that would grow government. The big question was, what can they get away with? (We see the same dynamics playing out in climate change.)
3) Incomprehensible by design: A sentence was not used if a paragraph could be concocted. Thousands of new requirements, regulations, laws, and standards were contained in dense verbiage that neither Congress nor the public would ever read and couldn’t understand if they did. Almost every paragraph includes expanded powers and hidden consequences. Citizens would be further reduced to a childlike dependence on bureaucrats.
4) Public excluded from legislative process. The complexity of the political process, plus the density of jargon and propaganda, ensured that John Q Citizen was ignored. These programs were passed by stealth, chicanery, arm-twisting, and bribes. The Cornhusker Kickback put ObamaCare over the top. Similarly, so-called stimulus money earmarked for shovel-ready jobs was used as grants (i.e. bribes) to persuade the states to embrace Race to the Top, a precursor of Common Core. The fix was in.
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By Brittany Corona.
Common Core is on the ropes. More and more states are pulling back from the national standards as the 2014–15 school year implementation deadline looms near.
In Louisiana, Governor Bobby Jindal (R)—formerly a Common Core supporter—is now encouraging the legislature to remove the state from the Common Core aligned Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for Colleges and Careers (PARCC) test. And if they don’t act, he will.
Jindal’s new stance comes after eight members of the Louisiana State House of Representatives sent him a letter, informing him of his prerogative to opt out of the standards and encouraging him to do so. As The New Orleans Advocate reported:
Gov. Bobby Jindal said Monday that a gubernatorial order for the state to drop controversial Common Core tests is a ‘very viable option’ if state lawmakers fail to act. Jindal made the comment in response to a letter from eight House members who said the governor can opt the state out of the exams and should do that… ‘We believe you have the authority, as governor, under the 2010 PARCC memorandum of understanding, to opt out of the consortium,’ state Rep. Brett Geymann, (R–Lake Charles), and seven other legislators wrote.
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In the most recent instance, New York parent Deanne Knight addressed a confusing Common Core-aligned math question, EAGnews.org reports.
Knight and her daughter, who is in first grade, encountered the question when it appeared on a worksheet from the New York Department of Education’s EngageNY lesson plan website.
The worksheet contains the words “NY’s Common Core Mathematics Curriculum.”
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The brands – and apparently even some of their familiar trademark symbols – appeared in tests questions for students ranging from third to eighth grades, reports The Post-Standard of Syracuse.
Over one million students were required to take the tests.
Parents, teachers and school administrators have speculated that the kid-friendly brand names are a new form of product placement.
Education materials behemoth Pearson, which has a $32 million five-year contract to develop New York’s Common Core-related tests, has barred teachers and school officials from disclosing the contents of the tests.
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Mystified parents were trying to advise mystified children. The parents, presumably the wise members of the society, were helpless to say anything useful when confronted by the weird complexities of “reform” math, which has now been rolled forward into Common Core.
Here is a commonplace horror story that can stand in for millions of others: “When Mike and Camille Chudzinski tried to help their son with his homework earlier this fall, they were bewildered. The fourth-grader brought home no spelling lists, few textbooks, and a whole new approach to solving math problems. When he tackled multi-digit addition, for instance, Patrick did not just line up the two numbers and then add the columns, as his parents had been taught to do. Instead, he sketched out a graph with a series of arrows and marks that appeared at first to his parents as indecipherable as hieroglyphics.”
When we hear these stories, we typically focus on the comical oddity of adults not being able to do homework intended for children. How is that even possible? But the ramifications are anything but funny. The real damage is that Reform Math opens up fractures throughout society. Parents are cut off from their children. Parents and schools are pitted against each other. Students are alienated from their teachers and schools.
Sociologist James Coleman said that the most important thing in successful education is what he called “social capital.” Ideally, parents, kids, schools, and community are on the same page, working toward the same goals. In this way the children feel they are doing appropriate and necessary things. Energy is used to complete tasks, not to debate the merits of the tasks.
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Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert ripped into the Common Core standards on his Tuesday night show, ridiculing the absurd Core-aligned math problems that have baffled students, parents and teachers nationwide.
“Common Core testing prepares students for what they will face as adults: pointless stress and confusion,” he said with characteristic sarcasm.
The controversial standards have been criticized for introducing federal control over local education matters. The Obama administration has encouraged states to adopt them by rewarding Core-aligned states with federal grants.
The standards require vigorous national standardized testing, which has provoked outcries among parents and teachers who consider the tests to be too difficult and a waste of time.
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Photo Credit: U.S. National Archives (Creative Commons)
By B. Christopher Agee.
Fierce criticism of federal educational guidelines known as Common Core is growing among parents and students alike. Countless reports and examples suggest the curriculum values leftist social engineering far more than legitimate education.
One free-thinking eighth grade student in New York took the initiative to investigate mandates surrounding the program and offered her insight to her classmates. As a result, she now claims she is facing retribution in the form of a two-day suspension.
After determining required tests under Common Core are “set up for the kids to fail,” Seirra Olivero did some research and found out that students may opt out of the exams – a fact administrators apparently want to keep quiet. She recently informed other students at Orange-Ulster BOCES that they were not required to take the unpopular tests, explaining administrators told her to “shut [her] mouth and keep walking.”
Olivero was subsequently called in for a meeting with the principal, which she said was punctuated by the authority figure asking, in a rude tone, why she made such claims.
“I replied and said, ‘I did some research and it said they don’t have to,’” she recalled, indicating the principal continued berating her and refused her request to call home.
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Such has been the roll-out of Common Core testing in New York, the first state to implement the test component of the controversial nationalized educational standard.
Seirra Olivero, a 13-year-old student at Orange-Ulster BOCES, claims she was suspended from school last week after telling classmates they could opt out of taking the Common Core English test — a decision few students and parents in the area knew was possible, according to the girl’s mother.
The eighth-grader was suspended for two days for “insubordination,” following the April 1 incident, in which she informed her friends they had a choice whether or not to take the exam on the day of the test. According to Seirra, she had just stepped off the school bus when she encountered a fellow classmate who was “anxious” about taking the test.
“I told my friend he didn’t have to take the test and then a teacher who overheard me told me to shut my mouth and keep walking,” Seirra told FoxNews.com. Once inside the school, Seirra told another friend the test was not mandatory, she says, prompting that same teacher to usher her into the principal’s office. After walking out of the principal’s office following an argument and then threatening to sue an administrator over his handling of the matter, Seirra was given a two-day suspension.
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