It Is Not the Standards
Most people trying to combat Common Core seem to be focused on proving that the standards are bad, wrong, harmful, stupid, and otherwise nefarious. I think this is the wrong approach.

“Common Core standards” are not some magical, immovable, self-evident set of guidelines and goals that are time-tested and mother-approved. Rather, they are a set of tasks that are promoted mostly by people who stand to gain from their implementation and others who aren’t remotely conversant about what they are promoting outside of memorized rhetoric (see Utah’s District #12 school board representative Dixie Allen, et. al.)
The “standards” can change at any time. They can be moderated to quell the opposition or moderated to make the opposition powerless.
The Core Standards website has a page titled Read the Standards. It’s really an our-standards-are-awesome-sauce-even-through-we-cite-no-sources cheerleading page. (You know, because of academic rigor and all that.) From there you can go to a mathematics standards cheerleading page and a language arts cheerleading page. Which makes one wonder if the standards are so obviously keen, why so much promotion has to precede the actual presentation. But I digress.
The problem with the “standards” we are imposing on children all across the country is that we are imposing them on all children all across the country.
The feds are in control of the standards and the feds can change them at will. We are dependent on them because we are choosing to accept the bribe and all the conditions that go along with it. We all know that once we become accustomed to “free” money, we almost never go back. We will continue to capitulate to the demands made by the federal government to keep the “necessary” money coming in. And if we ever suggest otherwise, we will be accused of hurting the children.
In the supposed “reddest of all states,” seeing the money/power grab from Governor Gary Herbert, appointed Attorney General Sean Reyes, and other self-proclaimed conservatives is most disheartening. Your children are the sorry “benefactors” of this move and by the time it is repealed (if it is) the damage to their generation will be done.
The foundational problem with Common Core isn’t any particular standard on any particular day. It is giving up control of education to: federal bureaucracy; people, agencies, and companies with severe conflicts of interest; and people who are not and will never be accountable for the results. [click to continue…]
Recent Comments