GAMALIEL ISAAC: THE TRAVESTY CALLED COMMON CORE STANDARDS PART 2
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/obamacore-the-travesty-called-the-common-core-standards-part-ii
Irving school was so bad that pupils threw a chair out of a window and killed a woman walking below. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that academic performance was unlikely to have been stellar at the Irving School.
The performance of the pupils in the Irving school was low even by New York City standards; in fact it was so low that the Bloomberg administration decided to give the school an ultimatum. They were told to make curriculum changes and that if the scores of the school didn’t go up they’d be closed. The teachers made the curriculum changes, the students continued to fail and the school was closed. The school might have had a chance if instead of changing the curriculum police had been stationed in the hallways.
The building that housed the Irving School now houses one of the Success Academy Charter schools. That school outperforms most New York City schools. One of the reasons it does is discipline. According to Insideschools.org, Success Academy schools are famous for a no-nonsense attitude toward bad behavior. Defiant kids who don’t obey the conspicuously posted school rules quickly earn punishments ranging from brief timeouts to school suspensions.
There is evidence that American classrooms that are disciplined perform well. African American and Hispanic students have more discipline problems than white students. The filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan pointed out in the New York Post that if you pull out schools which are predominantly African-American and Hispanic, the data show that the rest of the kids are being taught better in America than anywhere else in the world.
The Common Core curriculum is likely to reduce discipline. The Common Core Curriculum requires that teachers teach boring informational texts such as long passages in EPA handbooks about insulation levels. Jeremiah Chaffee, a high school English teacher in upstate New York wrote that he was struck by how out of sync the Common Core is with what he considers to be good teaching and that “Such pedagogy makes school wildly boring.” One alarmed high-school English teacher, reporting on a Common Core training session that used the Gettysburg Address as an example, noted that teachers were instructed to read the speech aloud to the class not as Lincoln would have spoken it, with power and emotion, but rather without inflection. A past president of the National Council of Teachers of English declared herself “aghast at the vision of the dreariness and harshness of the classrooms [the standards-writers] attempt to create.”
If the creators of Common Core want children to learn they should be designing a curriculum that instills a love of learning instead of making learning an unpleasant chore. If they want disciplined classrooms they should make the material exciting. If the U.S. government wants Americans to be more competitive on the world stage, instead of creating boring curricula, its primary focus should be repealing laws that prevent administrators from bringing discipline to the classroom.
Could the Goals of Leveling the Playing Field be Hurting American Competitiveness?
Dr. Milgram’s statement regarding how State Department of Educations lowered the standards of Common Core may be surprising, after all one would think that the goal of Department of Educations is to see to it that students are well educated. The degree that other goals can take priority is illustrated by the story of the Shuang Wen School and the New York Department of Education.
Shuang Wen is located in district 1, a district with many progressive schools with lower standards. I have included a table of ratings by insideschools.org of the performance of school in the same district as Shuang Wen in 2011 to show just how much Shuang Wen outperformed its peer schools.
| School | Math | English |
| Anna Silver | 53.2 | 31 |
| Children’s workshop | 56.7 | 50 |
| Earth school | 67.8 | 69.5 |
| Neighborhood school | 68.9 | 68.3 |
| East Village | 76.2 | 77.8 |
| Shuang Wen | 98.4 | 89.2 |
Shuang Wen was a shining light in a mediocre school district. One would think that the city would have done everything it could to support that school. Instead the principal of that school was investigated more than a dozen times.
I think that the high proportion of Chinese students in the Shuang Wen School and their vastly superior performance compared to schools with other minority populations sent a message the DOE did not want heard. It made the DOE look bad for the poor performance of other schools. It also sent a message that Chinese outperform other minorities and that didn’t fit the ideologies of DOE bureaucrats. Since the DOE could not raise the performance of the other schools they leveled the playing field by bringing down the Shuang Wen School. Rather than admit that Chinese students as a whole were more hard working and respectful of their teachers and more devoted to education than large percentages of other minority groups, the DOE blamed Shuang Wen’s principal for the inferior performance of the other schools of District 1. They looked for reasons to get rid of her and found ridiculous excuses such as her reporting students attending school when they left early in the day to celebrate the Chinese New Year.
On July 1, 2011 DOE marched into the school with the police. Trinh Eng, one of the parents at the school told a reporter what happened next.
“One girl, entering her 8th grade year at Shuang Wen, was completely devastated. Teachers held each other and cried,” she said. “[When] Principal Ling Ling Chou came out of the building, a thundering, spontaneous round of applause erupted amidst of shouts of “Thank you.”
The DOE’s hostility to Ling Ling Chou was so great that after parents put up a memorial poster in her honor on a wall in the school the DOE ordered it taken down.
The principal the DOE hated so much had an extraordinary work ethic and devotion to her school. She knew every student by name and came in on Saturdays to tutor children who needed help. Students and teachers knew she cared about them and that motivated them.
Two years later Shuang Wen is still a good school but it is not the great school it was when Ling Ling Chou was the principal.
Perhaps Common Core could have been a great curriculum but because of the influence of DOEs and other groups whose primary goals are not the education of our children it is a very bad curriculum.
Is Common Core Data Collection Dangerous?
President Obama and Arne Duncan have both said they want a cradle to career data system tracking kids. Attitudes tracked by Common Core include:
1. Political affiliations or beliefs of the student or parent;
2. Mental and psychological problems of the student or the student’s family;
3. Sex behavior or attitudes;
4. Illegal, anti-social, self-incriminating, and demeaning behavior;
5. Critical appraisals of other individuals with whom respondents have close family relationships;
6. Legally recognized privileged or analogous relationships, such as those of lawyers, physicians, and ministers;
7. Religious practices, affiliations, or beliefs of the student or the student’s parent
Shocked parents in Illinois were asked to complete a Common Core survey about their political beliefs and told the Illinois review that they feared retribution against their children if they didn’t complete the survey.
The answers to these questions are stored in a central database. The fact that Common Core collects a lot more information than could possibly be helpful for improving the curriculum is raising concerns that attitude modification plans of the Common Core creators are not limited to motivating students and extend to indoctrinating students to promote their concept of “social justice”.
Please return tomorrow for Part III
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