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Parental Revolt Against Common Core Prompts States to Take Action

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Photo Credit: Fox News

Photo Credit: Fox News

Eleven-year-old Leo Tuttle is a fifth-grader at an Indianapolis private school, where he struggles to keep up with the demanding curriculum.

But the school is where Leo’s mother, Erin Tuttle, wants him to be, rather than a public school or even the Catholic school he previously attended.

Erin Tuttle moved Leo to the private school when her home state of Indiana, along with 45 other states, agreed to follow the Common Core State Standards Initiative for all its public schools and those following the charter school program, such as the Catholic school. The Common Core standards are a set of guidelines for schools, initiated federally, to improve and make consistent education standards in math and English language arts.

The goal of Common Core is to “… articulate what students need to know in grades K-12 in order to be ready for college or a career after they graduate,” said Mike Casserly, executive director of the Council of Great City Schools, which supports and promotes the standards.

Many students and teachers saw the standards for the first time this year, as the program was being phased in nationwide. And now that they’ve seen it, many are not happy with it, and they’re joining an ever-increasing group of critics who are lining up against it.

Read more from this story HERE.

This Second Grader’s Revenge Against Common Core Math Will Make Your Day

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By Eric Owens.

The litany of frighteningly stupid Common Core math worksheets never ends. Perhaps now, though, kids are starting to fight back in satisfyingly creative ways.

An alert reader sent The Daily Caller this image of her seven-year-old son’s perfectly reasonable homework answer. The boy attends a public elementary school in San Jose, Calif. He is in the second grade.

Photo Credit: Daily Caller

Photo Credit: Daily Caller

The math curriculum used by the school is GO Math! The publisher of GO Math! is Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

The parent who sent the homework question to TheDC noted that the curriculum aligns with the Common Core math standards.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Common Core: Anatomy of a Failure

By Bruce Deitrick Price.

When Bill and Melinda Gates go to Africa and see healthy people and sick people, they presumably have a single thought: what can we do to make everyone healthy? The problems are easily understood; goals can be clearly stated. Given a big commitment, there’s a high chance of success.

When Bill Gates looks at education in America and sees good students and bad students, he probably assumes that these variations are part of the human condition. That’s not a promising problem to focus on.

What fascinates Bill Gates is something else entirely: namely, the variety and incoherence from school to school, city to city, and state to state. It looks so messy and inefficient. And he thinks: a guy with my money and management skills should be able to organize all this disorder, turn it into an efficient machine, save the country, and make another fortune in the process.

Potentially all true.

But at that moment he has lost the game. Because he is no longer talking about educational goals, which must be our main concern. He is talking about standardization. He is talking about a tidier assembly line. (But nobody ever said that democracy is supposed to be tidy. Dictatorship is tidy.)

Bill Gates brought a programmer’s sensibility to education. There is a maximally efficient way to design a piece of software. So let’s do that, and stop all this other nonsense. Bad plan, even with the best of intentions.

Read more from this story HERE.

Eleven Dumbest Common Core Problems

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Photo Credit: National Review

Photo Credit: National Review

The Common Core State Standards Initiative is widely denounced for imposing confusing, unhelpful experimental teaching methods, involving test problems that lack essential information and sometimes make no sense whatsoever.

Some 45 states and the District of Columbia have so far adopted Common Core standards, leaving students all around the United States to puzzle over Common Core’s mysterious logic and language.

Here are eleven Common Core–compliant problems that have caused parents, students, and even teachers to scratch their heads or respond in outrage:

1. Starting with an easily solvable problem, New York takes the simple “7+7″ and complicates it with something called “number bonds.”

Common Core 1

2. Not willing to ruin addition alone, Common Core takes aim at subtraction as well, forcing students to make visual representations of numbers in columns.

Common Cor 2.

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Common Core: Bad Math Meets Radical Politics (+video)

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Photo Credit: Matthew Kenwrick / Creative Commons

Photo Credit: Matthew Kenwrick / Creative Commons

How bad are the Common Core State Standards horror stories getting? A friend of mine in Scotland sent me this video, saying that he was speechless, and that this is so bad, they don’t even have this in socialist Europe.

Welcome to the Common Core, where children are taught the principles of social justice and socialist agitation.

The video is shocking. This is extreme material, and it’s getting almost no play outside of grassroots opposition coming from parents faced with Common Core homework:

Here we see actual Common Core materials being put out and used by (primarily unionized) government teachers across the country, in states that have swallowed the Common Core agenda.

Read more from this story HERE.

Keep Calm and Refuse the NYS Tests

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Photo Credit: Fox News

Photo Credit: Fox News

While her son’s fourth-grade classmates were taking the nation’s first round of tests under the controversial Common Core program, Heidi Indelecato decided to teach her son a lesson in civil disobedience.

“We respectfully refuse to participate in the test,” said Indelecato, whose son Benjamin attends school in Lancaster, N.Y., which on Tuesday became the first state to administer testing under the Common Core State Standards Initiative.

So while other kids sat poised with their No. 2 pencils above Scantron sheets, Benjamin studied with his mother, who documented the occasion with a picture of the pair wearing T-shirts that read: “Keep calm and and refuse the NYS tests.”

Common Core was adopted by 45 states, although Indiana withdrew last month. The set of standards, devised by the nation’s school superintendents at the behest of the National Governors Association, seeks to set a uniform standard for grades K-12, to ensure kids all over the nation reach the same minimum level of learning.

The program involves testing of students in grades 3-8 and high school testing is scheduled to begin next year.New York implemented the standards a year early.

Read more from this story HERE.

Republican Running for Governor of NY Plans to Take a Stand for His Kids With ’Symbolic’ Protest of Common Core

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Photo Credit: The Blaze

Photo Credit: The Blaze

A Republican candidate for governor of New York said he and his wife plan to pull their children from Common Core testing in a “symbolic” protest on Tuesday.

In a short campaign video, Rob Astorino says his “family’s protest tomorrow is a symbolic one.”

“But as parents, we think it’s important to take a stand. Our children aren’t guinea pigs, Governor Cuomo, and we want them educated by teachers — not faceless bureaucrats in Washington,” he added.

He claims hundreds of thousands of New York children from third to eighth grade will be subjected to Common Core testing on Tuesday. Astorino said his kids will remain in school but opt out of the test.

New York News

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Bill Gates Loves Common Core for Your Kids, BUT NOT HIS

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Photo Credit: Getty / Alex Wong

Photo Credit: Getty / Alex Wong

By Eric Owens. Billionaire software tycoon Bill Gates has poured millions of dollars into efforts to develop and promote the Common Core State Standards Initiative, a set of K-12 math and language arts curriculum benchmarks and high-stakes standardized tests now being implemented in 46 states.

Strangely enough, though, Common Core isn’t quite good enough for Gates and his wife, Melinda, when it comes to the education of their own three children.

Diane Ravitch, a self-styled education policy iconoclast who tends to oppose Common Core (and charter schools, and much else), noted this irony on her blog earlier this week.

The children of Bill and Melinda Gates – Jennifer, Rory and Phoebe – have attended Lakeside School, Seattle’s most elite, fancypants private school.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Common Core debate likely to heat up again

By Mike Wiser.

Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas had just left the stage at the Des Moines Marriott and walked into a gaggle of reporters.

Cruz had been speaking to an assembly of home-school families. He told them he believed in religious freedom and educational choice. With the reporters, he added a finer point.

“I emphatically oppose the Common Core,” he said.

He’s not alone.

In statehouses across the country, legislators are debating laws to delay, or eliminate, parts of the Common Core standards for reasons ranging from curriculum control to suspicion over government data collection.

Read more from this story HERE.

More Parents Choose Homeschooling Due To Common Core

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

As Common Core champions like Jeb Bush, Bill Gates, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce continue to attack parents, teachers, and taxpayers for what they claim are “myths” spread about the centralized standards initiative, many parents across the nation are not convinced.

They are refusing to subject their children to the stress, pressure, and confusion associated with the Common Core by opting out of the assessments aligned with the standards, or by withdrawing them from school and choosing homeschooling instead.

WHNT 19 News in Alabama reports a growing number of families making the decision to withdraw their children from school in order to homeschool because of “confusion,” “chaos,” and stress related to the Common Core standards.

“It [Common Core] has caused chaos in our house, and it’s not worth it,” said Lori Peden, who has withdrawn two of her children from McBride Elementary in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. “The teachers are not comfortable teaching it. They’re frustrated. Parents are upset, kids are not making good grades. That’s what I’ve seen.”

Peden said she never had plans to homeschool her children, but did so after she observed her son struggling with Common Core math assignments in which he was required to find and learn up to half a dozen different pathways to the same final answer, an endeavor that created confusion and constant stress.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: YouTube

Photo Credit: YouTube

School district to mother: No Common Core opt-outs, let us humiliate your kids

By Robby Soave.

An Ohio school district told a worried parent that she wasn’t allowed to opt-out of Common Core testing for her kids–and then it forced the kids to be weighed and measured as part of body mass index testing.

The angry mother, Sarah Lewis, said her request to opt her kids out of any school-sponsored Common Core testing was vigorously rejected by Celina City SchoolsSuperintendent Jesse Steiner, according to The Heartland Institute.

“[O]n the recommendation of legal counsel, I am rejecting your request for your child to ‘Opt Out’ of any and all testing,” wrote Steiner in an email to Lewis. “Your child will be expected to follow the same educational procedures as the rest of the student body.”

Lewis opposes implementation of the Common Core standards, a controversial set of curriculum guidelines and standardized testing currently being implemented in most states.

Read more from this story HERE.

Common Core Shows Fourth Graders Gory, Painful Ways to Kill Class Pets

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Photo Credit: Getty Images

Photo Credit: Getty Images

Common Core math has gotten a lot of negative attention.

However, the Common Core standards also mandate a nonfiction-heavy reading regime that devalues literature tremendously. Specifically, under the Common Core standards, “informational texts” must constitute a huge part of what students read.

So, what exactly is in these “informational texts”?

In the idyllic expanses of New York’s Lakeland Central School District, the “informational texts” for fourth graders are disturbing agitprop from the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).

As EAGnews.org reports, the entire text forced on the fourth-grade kids was taken word-for-word from the PETA website PETAkids.com—home of the “30-day vegan pledge,” militant screeds against KFC and statement such as: “Zoos collect animals and put them on display to make money.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Common Core Cant

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Photo Credit: National Review

Photo Credit: National Review

With the Common Core State Standards encountering remarkable political turbulence, you might think advocates would focus their energies on making their case and answering critics. After all, just yesterday Indiana became the first state to reverse its decision to adopt the Common Core. Instead, leading advocates seem intent on using junk polling to say, “There’s nothing to see here.”

Yesterday, the Collaborative for Student Success — a mishmash of substantial educational philanthropies — released a poll that purported to show that Americans love the Common Core even if they don’t know it. The new poll showed that two-thirds of respondents like the Common Core and that one-third “strongly” support it. This is pretty remarkable given that, just last summer, over 60 percent of respondents told Gallup they had never heard of the Common Core. What explains the remarkable shift? It turns out that the positive response was elicited after pollsters read just “a single sentence describing” the Common Core.

That “single sentence” explained: “To ensure that all students are prepared for success after graduation, the Common Core Standards establish a set of clear, consistent guidelines for what students should know and be able to do at each grade level across subjects.” (The astonishing thing is that 24 percent of respondents disapproved even after this explanation.) Fifty-seven percent of Republicans reportedly support the Common Core, thus described, and 60 percent of respondents would be more likely to vote for a pro–Common Core candidate.

Read more from this story HERE.