If you have been following Common Core, it came like a comet, and was nearly universally adopted by states in 2010 before it was written. It's pretty clear it is on the way out now although it will be a couple of years before the useful-idiot proponents crawl off to dank caves in ignominy.
Bill Gates though, has already admitted defeat. In the most recent Gates Foundation Newsletter discussed below, the announcement - as delicately worded as it is - of defeat is made. With no answer on what to do next. A big "whoopsie!"
So it's over. Common Core was a mistake, says the Gates Foundation, as more states drop out of it and ever more humiliating videos/web postings reveal the Emperor without Clothes.
First to what he did, in conjunction with Obama and a complacent congress:
Before any standards were written, before anything was tested, Gates and Obama together got Common Core nearly universally accepted by states - I think it was 46 states at one time in 2010. States eagerly signed up for Race to the Top money, which required adhering to the yet-unwritten Common Core. Oddly, this money came from the historic theft, the bank bailout legislation. A pot of billions to meddle in education.
Gates had a committee working on "standards" in the meantime. After all, kids are just Electrical Outlets as Gates told us. Surely a committee can just be assigned the chore of coming up with an illegal national standard. All the states have already agreed to whatever they come up with. What could go wrong?
It's 37 states and falling now, and the Gates Foundation itself is already chalking it up to "lessons learned".
Since the political beginning of Common Core, scores on the international PISA math test have deteriorated, going from 25th to 31st place (2009 vs 2012). The 2015 results have not been published yet but the NAEP math scores fell for the first time since 1990! So it is only a question how much FURTHER we have fallen internationally. Maybe 40th now, who knows. We shall soon see, and Gates knows it. He's jumping ship, out of the plane with his parachute before the really bad news for Common Core hits this December.
So congratulations.
I think the current count is thirteen states completely out, and only a few of the remaining not having legislation proposed to back out. If you don't have a national test and don't have a national curriculum, you do not have a Common Core, logically.
Call it a "majority core" if you like, barely. but note the blood loss and imminent suicide of yet another initiative in the endless parade of political fads since the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act was passed.
This Act contains the prime culprit, the federal educational grants to states. It is the state bureaucracy applying for the grants, not the legislatures. The grants require compliance with whatever conditions the feds feel like imposing. So it is a way of bypassing state legislatures. Every New Math fad is imposed on states by making the grant contingent on, in this case, adopting the unwritten New New Math of Common Core.
Massachusetts is probably the real turning point if there is one state to pick of the most importance. It is the top educational performer nationally. Common Core was alleged to do what Massachusetts did by themselves, vaulting to the very top echelon on international tests. Massachusetts signed on. Until they saw the actual standards. So they've bailed.
As usual in political affairs, Common Core supposedly raising standards was a deception. It raises standards of the lowest, yes. Inappropriately so. But look where our math scores fell as of 2015:
http://ift.tt/1UDhj7i
The scores fell where Common Core dropped the ball. Yet we were told standards were being raised. The New New Math logic is convoluted. Tantamount to requiring algebra before counting numbers.
One of the deceptions in the Common Core math hooey was to scare and humiliate students, parents, critics, etc. by requiring grade-schoolers know about base 10 vs. other base systems in math. At the upper end, like 8th grade, they're actually pretty poor standards and that is the only politically feasible common denominator. The wider the net, the lower the standard has to be unless you want school board and state legislature elections thrown into revolt. This has been proven out already.
But the deception of New New Math was that you do not understand what it means to go from 10 to 11 until you first understand that it is one unit of tens and one unit of ones. That is why the only person on the Common Core math development committee resigned: developmentally inappropriate concepts. By creating this hoax and imposing it on millions of school children, their math performance has declined. The longer it is in place, the greater this decline is going to be.
There were other developmentally inappropriate tactics too, and this has generated countless youtube and website examples of Common Core Math nonsense. It had not been written as it was being adopted. It was never tested. Critics were treated to emotional attacks and sophistry, not evidence.
When I first heard of Common Core, I looked it up and came to the common core website. It was reams of word salad, concealing that nothing had been written yet and that a committee essentially appointed by Bill Gates was in the process of writing it.
I did not learn this from the Common Core website. Instead it was all this manipulative bunk about being a grass roots effort led by the states; how it was a set of standards where every state got to be different and that is how we make them common yet with 50 different versions. It was nonsense. Groups that arose in opposition to Common Core were the only places to find out what was actually going on with all the Gates Foundation money, the committee working on standards essentially in secret, etc.
Now that they have had their way, the evidence is coming in. In the form of LOWER scores, yet to DETERIORATE FURTHER. This will kill even the most smug and arrogant insects of Common Core sophistry as of this December.
We (Wife and I) planned, experimented, and eventually discovered by experience that our kids learned math best with physical objects and concrete personal problems like sharing candy equitably between brothers. We did not make up problems so much as we HAD existing problems that could be expressed mathematically.
We studied Singapore, Shanghai, Japan, a number of states, read peer review literature, and came away with one simple fact: if the parents or whoever else is the role model for the kids places high value on math, reading, writing, etc. then the child will be eager to achieve in those subjects. That is what's wrong. Our cultural values. Anti-Intellectual values.
When mom and dad are excited about academics, the kids will be too. When their teachers, peers, and cultural media are excited about academics, they will be too.
We visited our local school because they said they had a "placement test" they could do for our six year old. It turned out to be naming colors, shapes, taking his coat on and off, and walking in a straight line. If he could do all that then he could be admitted to first grade next fall. :boggled:
So I had him recite the Pythagorean Theorem and draw out a right triangle, explaining how you put the theorem to use in deducing the length of the hypotenuse. They thought that was FUNNY. ha ha ha, said the head teacher of the school - I haven't seen that since I was in high school.
It was telling, comparing the reaction of the two kids in the office, 7th and 6th grade, vs. the two teachers. One set was wide-eyed, jaws dropping, and the statement "he knows more than WE do!". The other set was minimizing, belittling, making emotional attacks. The second teacher said we "had a problem". But "don't worry, it is not as bad as having a retard". I forget what euphemism she used for retard. Some politically correct term. I was distracted by how offensive she was being. We've worked for years, studied hard, put a lot of effort into creating this "problem".
The head teacher was most condescending about "pushing too hard" and went on a long monologue about how her daughter was so brilliant, yet she was not going to do something so horrible to her as skip a grade. There was a Celebrate Diversity poster on the wall, to which I pointed, and asked why having diversity in student ages and abilities was so horrible. If being black or gay is not a problem then why is academic ability a problem? Especially at a SCHOOL? A bright child a problem? How? They're getting a great reception from the other kids, older kids - why are you saying our eyes are deceiving us?
What a horrible attitude. We were treated as if we were idiots, but you have to act diplomatically even when they are insulting you.
Common Core claimed, before written, to prepare our children for college and employment in the global economy. Colleges, especially graduate programs, are being flooded with foreign enrollment. It is unprecedented, growing nearly 100% since the 1980's. Asia is far and away the largest source, larger than all others combined, and it follows logically from the fact they are the highest scoring on the PISA tests.
To compete with world primary/secondary standards we have to be YEARS ahead of US standards. So much so that you are automatically not just a geek but some kind of phenomenon locally. So you are a target for harassment, bullying - a threat to the teachers who can so easily set all the students against you. We watched it happen before our eyes at the local school as the teachers showed the kids how to correct their initially enthusiastic response to a math whiz. The teaches demonstrated the politically correct response of ridicule, invalidation and emotional attacks against the parents. Accusation of abuse. Math ability = problem. Math ability = child abuse.
It's just the reflection of the sad state of our culture and educational system. Shanghai is graduating high school at SEVEN YEARS ahead of our local school in math. If you were in that public school, you'd need to graduate high school at age 10 to be comparable age-to-age with Shanghai. In the information age, the global economy, that's who our kids are competing with: Shanghai, Hong Kong, Korea, and everyone else who is kicking our ass.
As the USA falls even further, and we know it will on the latest tests, it makes you that much more a target to desire being competitive globally. Last year we had to be seven years ahead of our local peers in math. Next year we'll have to be eight years ahead! It's crazy. We're doing it, a lot more in fact, but that's what you have to do: not be the best in your class, but be ahead of the 4th graders when you enter Kindergarten.
Do you make up a seven year gap at 12th grade by starting behind at Kindergarten? It seemed to us the easiest thing to do was come in to Kindergarten four or five years ahead of Shanghai. They may be fast but we put enough distance between us where we don't have to worry about it much. Go ahead and try, lol. We're doing algebra at age 6.
On the one hand, that gives us 12 years to finish calculus. We've done pre-calculus, the geometry and math via excel spreadsheet already. Maxima and minima. The concept of slope being zero at those two points. So 12 years to do calculus with some pre-calculus already under our belts. We just don't see that as a problem, lol.
So at an individual family level, that's what we did. We've evaded the whole Common Core. We eliminated the problem of all those Asians finishing ahead by lapping them a few times before school even starts.
So we don't have to worry about any new initiatives by the world's richest man, the federal government, or even our own state, or our own local school. They have one, by the way - and it is obscenely stupid. Irrational.
Homeschool has doubled already so clearly that's already what's next for millions: larger homeschool growth. It is framed by political enemies in all kinds of pejorative ways at the same time superior performance on tests by homeschoolers is explained away. People are doing it mainly because it is a vastly superior educational environment. Especially where socialization is concerned - not just the gangs, violence, drugs, the appalling performance, but the whole anti-intellectual atmosphere in (of all places) a huge swath of public schools.
As homeschoolers ourselves it is wonderful. There's no testing, no certification requirements, no curriculum oversight - no restrictions whatsoever. We see parents in town killing themselves with school board meetings, being on the board of their Charter School, PTA, all that effort when they can just teach their own kid the alphabet and how to add.
Trying to change the system by participating, in other words - huge waste of time. Direct teaching is amazingly effective.
Homeschool requires not just child abuse, the accelerated learning, but spousal abuse too in the form of a stay at home mom. We all know well enough the abuse of the patriarchy on the perpetual victim gender. I don't have to repeat that here. I abuse my wife in all kinds of ways and one of them is she teaches math, reading, and writing instead of self-actualizing as, say, a food service worker, accountant, or fireman.
We can point to homeschool growth as a repudiation of feminism too I suppose. That's good for the nation on its own merits.
Nationally, federally, this engine of grant money in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act is going to spawn new hokey initiatives. It's been a permanent part of the federal budget for half a century now and has had the same results from day 1 so how can that be expected to change?
I don't see anything but homeschool in the offing. Not that I am promoting it specifically other than how much better it is, :cool: but we are still in the grip of Common Core's Comet Tail and it is going to be a few years before a new acronym hits town.
Even Bill Gates, who funded the whole initiative (in order to achieve online computerized testing nationwide) looks pretty stupid now. Here is the most recent Gates Foundation Newsletter:
http://ift.tt/1XOgda1
Their Education letter starts off claiming to be a "learning organization", lol. We failed, who could imagine an unwritten and untested software program failing, right Bill? That's how you founded Microsoft, wasn't it? You sold software before you wrote it? Sold it before testing it?
lol. It wasn't MY fault I rolled out software that had not been written yet, had not been tested yet, and was nothing more than an asinine analogy that students are like electrical outlets.
All you have to do is put together a Committee for Electrical Outlets, and have your good friend the President direct billions of dollars in state educational grants to adopt whatever they come up with.
Right Bill? Right Sophists? Evidence-free proponents of Common Core?
So Bill admits it is a COURSE CORRECTION now. He is laughing all the way to the bank because what he managed to do was increase the size of the tech market by many tens of billions. One could figure out his share, but it is a lot more than the money he gave out from the foundation.
Los Angeles was a billion dollars alone in required tech upgrades - computers for the children and bandwidth. Steve Jobs captured that market in terms of the computers but Bill has done just fine across the dozens of states shifting from machine-graded pencil-and-paper tests to online interactive tests.
Alaska's tests were cancelled because of this. :thumbsup: Any idiot can foresee an online interactive computerized test is subject to catastrophic failure for millions, as compared with a pencil-and-paper test risking just about nothing.
http://ift.tt/26ainDt
Look how stupid online computerized testing has proven to be, just from a delivery standpoint. Not one K-12 student in the entire state could take the test because a fiber optic cable in Kansas was severed by a worker. Millions of dollars in tech upgrades. Performance = 0.
The important thing is that Alaska spent millions on tech industry upgrades in order to take the test. I'm feeling especially warm about the Bush schools because they were by far the most expensive, in the poorest communities of our state. Classes were just cancelled for a week, so wow was that a great leap forward in academics.
We weren't in the common core but incredibly our state financed an online computerized test, which was all Common Core amounted to. All Bill Gates wanted out of it. We used the same "non-profit" group to write our tests.
It was millions across the country that had maddening blue screen of death experiences instead of taking a test. The slow speeds for example - what a wonderful experience for the kids! The test is timed, so having the next question take three minutes to load is such a joy to the children!
Sorry, but your answer is incorrect because it took too long to download the question. :)
This is an admission of defeat from the engine behind Common Core. We could ask "what next" meaning what is next from the Gates fortune in meddling with education so recklessly. Without saying it explicitly, they are virtually announcing the end of their Common Core gambit and no idea how to untangle the mess they created.
Individual states, for the most part, are just re-taking control and as we know homeschool growth is explosive. Since 2000, it has grown well over 100%. It is still only about 2 million, about 4% of the total, but represents the most scholastically talented cohort. The best looking on any objective basis too, but I don't think that should be a weighting factor.
Private and parochial school enrollment has been a mixed scene over the last few decades. Parochial school, the largest of which is the Catholic School System, has declined as religion becomes less important to Americans on average:
http://ift.tt/1JBlcD2
So to call that a decline in "private" vs. public education I think inaccurate, but no matter. The data says enrollment in religious schools is in decline. Some of it is shifting to public schools, and some of it perhaps to homeschool. The public schools are subject to the parade of grant-financed initiatives and the parochial/homeschoolers by and large are not.
It's gone from 6 million to 5 million as a combined group with most the decline coming in the religious schools. That compares to roughly 50 million in the public school penitentiary/factory system. Potentially subject to common core.
We say penitentiary/factory system with apologies to both. It's an insult to prisons and factories in terms of the drudgery, oppression, the totalitarian nature and low quality staff in the Public School System. Given the vast quantities of money spent on it anyway. Vietnam, who we bombed into the stone age last generation has passed us up on the international tests using chalk and blackboard in open-air classrooms.
With 13 states, 26% of the states, out of Common Core already there's roughly 12 million students out of it. Roughly, 20 million students total evading the Common Core already, in the private/parochial/homeschool and non-participating states, with millions more to come. It could already be a minority of total US students by the end of this year.
All those textbooks, curriculum materials, the tens of billions in computer and bandwidth upgrades - all for declining scores, an even wider ethnic gap than before, and states abandoning ship. Gates admitting he was wrong.
The Gates Foundation announces a "course correction". To what? Hopefully, getting Bill Gates out of education. But he still has billions to inflict damage and he isn't really saying whether he is getting out of education altogether or going off on some new tangent.
Thanks Bill. That's leadership. Onto the titanic with your own life boat. On to the Hindenburg with your own parachute.
Generally the smartest people in the room tell us when it is okay to be critical of something when the overwhelming evidence bears no other conclusion. It was not politically correct to be against Common Core before it was written because grant money - Gates Foundation and Federal Department of Education money - dictated what was politically correct.
It's over now. The richest man in the world, behind the unwritten and untested curriculum/testing, has admitted defeat. He had a measurably negative impact on educational scores of US students. Way to go, Bill!
The Federal Race to the Top (AKA Common Core) had three phases. lol:
First phase of decline in PISA scores.
Second phase of decline in PISA scores
Third phase of decline in PISA scores
Phase IV is the death throes before us now. Here is the five-year report card the government wrote itself for Common Core, AKA Race to the Top:
http://ift.tt/1UDhyz5
In those 20 pages of executive summary there is not one word of reference to the declining scores on international examinations nor the declining scores on our own national tests.
If that isn't and indictment, an Emperor without Clothes, then there aren't any. It's a historic disgrace. I use that term "historic" because the Race to the Top program calls itself "historic".
In terms of Race to the Top, AKA Common Core, it is equivalent to Mao Tse Tung's Great Leap Forward. This is the NAEP "report card on education for 2015:
http://ift.tt/1XypKR1
First time since 1990 that scores declined! Yay Common Core! We're going to come in maybe 40th internationally, a decline of some 20 places internationally since Common Core's deceptive political origins. The years ahead are ones of chaos thank goodness, transitioning off Common Core.
Nothing beats student performance like changing initiatives, the way they read/write/calculate every few years. Like computer software, children can simply be re-programmed. Right, Bill? I can't wait for educational reform version 1.2!
Looking across the youtube and web examples of reckless, ill-conceived Common Core tests, problems, worksheets, and curricula the scores for this year are sure to decline further. Bill Gates sees it coming and he's jumped out of the plane with his parachute saying "I don't have all the answers".
Meaning: it didn't work, the rest of the country is in the airplane headed towards the mountain, and Bill with his billions is going to let us figure out what to do for ourselves as he takes the soft landing, billions more in tech profits. I was heavily criticized for pointing this out as the original objective for Bill Gates. But Bill has now quit after doing just that.
Bill Gates though, has already admitted defeat. In the most recent Gates Foundation Newsletter discussed below, the announcement - as delicately worded as it is - of defeat is made. With no answer on what to do next. A big "whoopsie!"
Quote:
|
From the beginning, Bill and Melinda wanted their foundation to be a learning organization; one that evolves and course corrects based on evidence. |
First to what he did, in conjunction with Obama and a complacent congress:
Before any standards were written, before anything was tested, Gates and Obama together got Common Core nearly universally accepted by states - I think it was 46 states at one time in 2010. States eagerly signed up for Race to the Top money, which required adhering to the yet-unwritten Common Core. Oddly, this money came from the historic theft, the bank bailout legislation. A pot of billions to meddle in education.
Gates had a committee working on "standards" in the meantime. After all, kids are just Electrical Outlets as Gates told us. Surely a committee can just be assigned the chore of coming up with an illegal national standard. All the states have already agreed to whatever they come up with. What could go wrong?
It's 37 states and falling now, and the Gates Foundation itself is already chalking it up to "lessons learned".
Since the political beginning of Common Core, scores on the international PISA math test have deteriorated, going from 25th to 31st place (2009 vs 2012). The 2015 results have not been published yet but the NAEP math scores fell for the first time since 1990! So it is only a question how much FURTHER we have fallen internationally. Maybe 40th now, who knows. We shall soon see, and Gates knows it. He's jumping ship, out of the plane with his parachute before the really bad news for Common Core hits this December.
So congratulations.
I think the current count is thirteen states completely out, and only a few of the remaining not having legislation proposed to back out. If you don't have a national test and don't have a national curriculum, you do not have a Common Core, logically.
Call it a "majority core" if you like, barely. but note the blood loss and imminent suicide of yet another initiative in the endless parade of political fads since the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act was passed.
This Act contains the prime culprit, the federal educational grants to states. It is the state bureaucracy applying for the grants, not the legislatures. The grants require compliance with whatever conditions the feds feel like imposing. So it is a way of bypassing state legislatures. Every New Math fad is imposed on states by making the grant contingent on, in this case, adopting the unwritten New New Math of Common Core.
Massachusetts is probably the real turning point if there is one state to pick of the most importance. It is the top educational performer nationally. Common Core was alleged to do what Massachusetts did by themselves, vaulting to the very top echelon on international tests. Massachusetts signed on. Until they saw the actual standards. So they've bailed.
As usual in political affairs, Common Core supposedly raising standards was a deception. It raises standards of the lowest, yes. Inappropriately so. But look where our math scores fell as of 2015:
Quote:
|
Education officials said that the first-time decline in math scores was unexpected, but that it could be related to changes ushered in by the Common Core standards, which have been adopted by more than 40 states. For example, some of the fourth-grade math questions on data analysis, statistics and geometry are not part of that grade’s guidelines under the Common Core and so might not have been covered in class. The largest score drops on the fourth-grade math exams were on questions related to those topics. |
The scores fell where Common Core dropped the ball. Yet we were told standards were being raised. The New New Math logic is convoluted. Tantamount to requiring algebra before counting numbers.
One of the deceptions in the Common Core math hooey was to scare and humiliate students, parents, critics, etc. by requiring grade-schoolers know about base 10 vs. other base systems in math. At the upper end, like 8th grade, they're actually pretty poor standards and that is the only politically feasible common denominator. The wider the net, the lower the standard has to be unless you want school board and state legislature elections thrown into revolt. This has been proven out already.
But the deception of New New Math was that you do not understand what it means to go from 10 to 11 until you first understand that it is one unit of tens and one unit of ones. That is why the only person on the Common Core math development committee resigned: developmentally inappropriate concepts. By creating this hoax and imposing it on millions of school children, their math performance has declined. The longer it is in place, the greater this decline is going to be.
There were other developmentally inappropriate tactics too, and this has generated countless youtube and website examples of Common Core Math nonsense. It had not been written as it was being adopted. It was never tested. Critics were treated to emotional attacks and sophistry, not evidence.
When I first heard of Common Core, I looked it up and came to the common core website. It was reams of word salad, concealing that nothing had been written yet and that a committee essentially appointed by Bill Gates was in the process of writing it.
I did not learn this from the Common Core website. Instead it was all this manipulative bunk about being a grass roots effort led by the states; how it was a set of standards where every state got to be different and that is how we make them common yet with 50 different versions. It was nonsense. Groups that arose in opposition to Common Core were the only places to find out what was actually going on with all the Gates Foundation money, the committee working on standards essentially in secret, etc.
Now that they have had their way, the evidence is coming in. In the form of LOWER scores, yet to DETERIORATE FURTHER. This will kill even the most smug and arrogant insects of Common Core sophistry as of this December.
We (Wife and I) planned, experimented, and eventually discovered by experience that our kids learned math best with physical objects and concrete personal problems like sharing candy equitably between brothers. We did not make up problems so much as we HAD existing problems that could be expressed mathematically.
We studied Singapore, Shanghai, Japan, a number of states, read peer review literature, and came away with one simple fact: if the parents or whoever else is the role model for the kids places high value on math, reading, writing, etc. then the child will be eager to achieve in those subjects. That is what's wrong. Our cultural values. Anti-Intellectual values.
When mom and dad are excited about academics, the kids will be too. When their teachers, peers, and cultural media are excited about academics, they will be too.
We visited our local school because they said they had a "placement test" they could do for our six year old. It turned out to be naming colors, shapes, taking his coat on and off, and walking in a straight line. If he could do all that then he could be admitted to first grade next fall. :boggled:
So I had him recite the Pythagorean Theorem and draw out a right triangle, explaining how you put the theorem to use in deducing the length of the hypotenuse. They thought that was FUNNY. ha ha ha, said the head teacher of the school - I haven't seen that since I was in high school.
It was telling, comparing the reaction of the two kids in the office, 7th and 6th grade, vs. the two teachers. One set was wide-eyed, jaws dropping, and the statement "he knows more than WE do!". The other set was minimizing, belittling, making emotional attacks. The second teacher said we "had a problem". But "don't worry, it is not as bad as having a retard". I forget what euphemism she used for retard. Some politically correct term. I was distracted by how offensive she was being. We've worked for years, studied hard, put a lot of effort into creating this "problem".
The head teacher was most condescending about "pushing too hard" and went on a long monologue about how her daughter was so brilliant, yet she was not going to do something so horrible to her as skip a grade. There was a Celebrate Diversity poster on the wall, to which I pointed, and asked why having diversity in student ages and abilities was so horrible. If being black or gay is not a problem then why is academic ability a problem? Especially at a SCHOOL? A bright child a problem? How? They're getting a great reception from the other kids, older kids - why are you saying our eyes are deceiving us?
What a horrible attitude. We were treated as if we were idiots, but you have to act diplomatically even when they are insulting you.
Common Core claimed, before written, to prepare our children for college and employment in the global economy. Colleges, especially graduate programs, are being flooded with foreign enrollment. It is unprecedented, growing nearly 100% since the 1980's. Asia is far and away the largest source, larger than all others combined, and it follows logically from the fact they are the highest scoring on the PISA tests.
To compete with world primary/secondary standards we have to be YEARS ahead of US standards. So much so that you are automatically not just a geek but some kind of phenomenon locally. So you are a target for harassment, bullying - a threat to the teachers who can so easily set all the students against you. We watched it happen before our eyes at the local school as the teachers showed the kids how to correct their initially enthusiastic response to a math whiz. The teaches demonstrated the politically correct response of ridicule, invalidation and emotional attacks against the parents. Accusation of abuse. Math ability = problem. Math ability = child abuse.
It's just the reflection of the sad state of our culture and educational system. Shanghai is graduating high school at SEVEN YEARS ahead of our local school in math. If you were in that public school, you'd need to graduate high school at age 10 to be comparable age-to-age with Shanghai. In the information age, the global economy, that's who our kids are competing with: Shanghai, Hong Kong, Korea, and everyone else who is kicking our ass.
As the USA falls even further, and we know it will on the latest tests, it makes you that much more a target to desire being competitive globally. Last year we had to be seven years ahead of our local peers in math. Next year we'll have to be eight years ahead! It's crazy. We're doing it, a lot more in fact, but that's what you have to do: not be the best in your class, but be ahead of the 4th graders when you enter Kindergarten.
Do you make up a seven year gap at 12th grade by starting behind at Kindergarten? It seemed to us the easiest thing to do was come in to Kindergarten four or five years ahead of Shanghai. They may be fast but we put enough distance between us where we don't have to worry about it much. Go ahead and try, lol. We're doing algebra at age 6.
On the one hand, that gives us 12 years to finish calculus. We've done pre-calculus, the geometry and math via excel spreadsheet already. Maxima and minima. The concept of slope being zero at those two points. So 12 years to do calculus with some pre-calculus already under our belts. We just don't see that as a problem, lol.
So at an individual family level, that's what we did. We've evaded the whole Common Core. We eliminated the problem of all those Asians finishing ahead by lapping them a few times before school even starts.
So we don't have to worry about any new initiatives by the world's richest man, the federal government, or even our own state, or our own local school. They have one, by the way - and it is obscenely stupid. Irrational.
Homeschool has doubled already so clearly that's already what's next for millions: larger homeschool growth. It is framed by political enemies in all kinds of pejorative ways at the same time superior performance on tests by homeschoolers is explained away. People are doing it mainly because it is a vastly superior educational environment. Especially where socialization is concerned - not just the gangs, violence, drugs, the appalling performance, but the whole anti-intellectual atmosphere in (of all places) a huge swath of public schools.
As homeschoolers ourselves it is wonderful. There's no testing, no certification requirements, no curriculum oversight - no restrictions whatsoever. We see parents in town killing themselves with school board meetings, being on the board of their Charter School, PTA, all that effort when they can just teach their own kid the alphabet and how to add.
Trying to change the system by participating, in other words - huge waste of time. Direct teaching is amazingly effective.
Homeschool requires not just child abuse, the accelerated learning, but spousal abuse too in the form of a stay at home mom. We all know well enough the abuse of the patriarchy on the perpetual victim gender. I don't have to repeat that here. I abuse my wife in all kinds of ways and one of them is she teaches math, reading, and writing instead of self-actualizing as, say, a food service worker, accountant, or fireman.
We can point to homeschool growth as a repudiation of feminism too I suppose. That's good for the nation on its own merits.
Nationally, federally, this engine of grant money in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act is going to spawn new hokey initiatives. It's been a permanent part of the federal budget for half a century now and has had the same results from day 1 so how can that be expected to change?
I don't see anything but homeschool in the offing. Not that I am promoting it specifically other than how much better it is, :cool: but we are still in the grip of Common Core's Comet Tail and it is going to be a few years before a new acronym hits town.
Even Bill Gates, who funded the whole initiative (in order to achieve online computerized testing nationwide) looks pretty stupid now. Here is the most recent Gates Foundation Newsletter:
http://ift.tt/1XOgda1
Their Education letter starts off claiming to be a "learning organization", lol. We failed, who could imagine an unwritten and untested software program failing, right Bill? That's how you founded Microsoft, wasn't it? You sold software before you wrote it? Sold it before testing it?
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Unfortunately, our foundation underestimated the level of resources and support required for our public education systems to be well-equipped to implement the standards. We missed an early opportunity to sufficiently engage educators – particularly teachers – but also parents and communities so that the benefits of the standards could take flight from the beginning. This has been a challenging lesson for us to absorb, but we take it to heart. The mission of improving education in America is both vast and complicated, and the Gates Foundation doesn’t have all the answers. |
All you have to do is put together a Committee for Electrical Outlets, and have your good friend the President direct billions of dollars in state educational grants to adopt whatever they come up with.
Right Bill? Right Sophists? Evidence-free proponents of Common Core?
So Bill admits it is a COURSE CORRECTION now. He is laughing all the way to the bank because what he managed to do was increase the size of the tech market by many tens of billions. One could figure out his share, but it is a lot more than the money he gave out from the foundation.
Los Angeles was a billion dollars alone in required tech upgrades - computers for the children and bandwidth. Steve Jobs captured that market in terms of the computers but Bill has done just fine across the dozens of states shifting from machine-graded pencil-and-paper tests to online interactive tests.
Alaska's tests were cancelled because of this. :thumbsup: Any idiot can foresee an online interactive computerized test is subject to catastrophic failure for millions, as compared with a pencil-and-paper test risking just about nothing.
http://ift.tt/26ainDt
Look how stupid online computerized testing has proven to be, just from a delivery standpoint. Not one K-12 student in the entire state could take the test because a fiber optic cable in Kansas was severed by a worker. Millions of dollars in tech upgrades. Performance = 0.
The important thing is that Alaska spent millions on tech industry upgrades in order to take the test. I'm feeling especially warm about the Bush schools because they were by far the most expensive, in the poorest communities of our state. Classes were just cancelled for a week, so wow was that a great leap forward in academics.
We weren't in the common core but incredibly our state financed an online computerized test, which was all Common Core amounted to. All Bill Gates wanted out of it. We used the same "non-profit" group to write our tests.
It was millions across the country that had maddening blue screen of death experiences instead of taking a test. The slow speeds for example - what a wonderful experience for the kids! The test is timed, so having the next question take three minutes to load is such a joy to the children!
Sorry, but your answer is incorrect because it took too long to download the question. :)
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Our learning journey in U.S. education is far from over, but we are in it for the long haul. I’m optimistic that the lessons we learn from our partners – and, crucially, from educators – will help the American school system once again become the powerful engine of equity we all believe it should be. |
Individual states, for the most part, are just re-taking control and as we know homeschool growth is explosive. Since 2000, it has grown well over 100%. It is still only about 2 million, about 4% of the total, but represents the most scholastically talented cohort. The best looking on any objective basis too, but I don't think that should be a weighting factor.
Private and parochial school enrollment has been a mixed scene over the last few decades. Parochial school, the largest of which is the Catholic School System, has declined as religion becomes less important to Americans on average:
http://ift.tt/1JBlcD2
So to call that a decline in "private" vs. public education I think inaccurate, but no matter. The data says enrollment in religious schools is in decline. Some of it is shifting to public schools, and some of it perhaps to homeschool. The public schools are subject to the parade of grant-financed initiatives and the parochial/homeschoolers by and large are not.
It's gone from 6 million to 5 million as a combined group with most the decline coming in the religious schools. That compares to roughly 50 million in the public school penitentiary/factory system. Potentially subject to common core.
We say penitentiary/factory system with apologies to both. It's an insult to prisons and factories in terms of the drudgery, oppression, the totalitarian nature and low quality staff in the Public School System. Given the vast quantities of money spent on it anyway. Vietnam, who we bombed into the stone age last generation has passed us up on the international tests using chalk and blackboard in open-air classrooms.
With 13 states, 26% of the states, out of Common Core already there's roughly 12 million students out of it. Roughly, 20 million students total evading the Common Core already, in the private/parochial/homeschool and non-participating states, with millions more to come. It could already be a minority of total US students by the end of this year.
All those textbooks, curriculum materials, the tens of billions in computer and bandwidth upgrades - all for declining scores, an even wider ethnic gap than before, and states abandoning ship. Gates admitting he was wrong.
The Gates Foundation announces a "course correction". To what? Hopefully, getting Bill Gates out of education. But he still has billions to inflict damage and he isn't really saying whether he is getting out of education altogether or going off on some new tangent.
Thanks Bill. That's leadership. Onto the titanic with your own life boat. On to the Hindenburg with your own parachute.
Generally the smartest people in the room tell us when it is okay to be critical of something when the overwhelming evidence bears no other conclusion. It was not politically correct to be against Common Core before it was written because grant money - Gates Foundation and Federal Department of Education money - dictated what was politically correct.
It's over now. The richest man in the world, behind the unwritten and untested curriculum/testing, has admitted defeat. He had a measurably negative impact on educational scores of US students. Way to go, Bill!
The Federal Race to the Top (AKA Common Core) had three phases. lol:
First phase of decline in PISA scores.
Second phase of decline in PISA scores
Third phase of decline in PISA scores
Phase IV is the death throes before us now. Here is the five-year report card the government wrote itself for Common Core, AKA Race to the Top:
http://ift.tt/1UDhyz5
In those 20 pages of executive summary there is not one word of reference to the declining scores on international examinations nor the declining scores on our own national tests.
If that isn't and indictment, an Emperor without Clothes, then there aren't any. It's a historic disgrace. I use that term "historic" because the Race to the Top program calls itself "historic".
In terms of Race to the Top, AKA Common Core, it is equivalent to Mao Tse Tung's Great Leap Forward. This is the NAEP "report card on education for 2015:
http://ift.tt/1XypKR1
First time since 1990 that scores declined! Yay Common Core! We're going to come in maybe 40th internationally, a decline of some 20 places internationally since Common Core's deceptive political origins. The years ahead are ones of chaos thank goodness, transitioning off Common Core.
Nothing beats student performance like changing initiatives, the way they read/write/calculate every few years. Like computer software, children can simply be re-programmed. Right, Bill? I can't wait for educational reform version 1.2!
Looking across the youtube and web examples of reckless, ill-conceived Common Core tests, problems, worksheets, and curricula the scores for this year are sure to decline further. Bill Gates sees it coming and he's jumped out of the plane with his parachute saying "I don't have all the answers".
Meaning: it didn't work, the rest of the country is in the airplane headed towards the mountain, and Bill with his billions is going to let us figure out what to do for ourselves as he takes the soft landing, billions more in tech profits. I was heavily criticized for pointing this out as the original objective for Bill Gates. But Bill has now quit after doing just that.
via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/23j04tZ
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