Obama’s K-12 Power Grab
President Obama’s bid to control what your children learn in school is surely one of the most important and disturbing of his many transformative plans. Not only is Obama’s attempt to devise what is in effect a national K–12 school curriculum arguably unconstitutional and illegal, the fact that most Americans have no idea that the new “Common Core” (a.k.a. Obamacore) even exists may be the most troubling thing about it.
Today’s Washington Post features an article on the controversy being kicked up by the new English curriculum that 46 states and the District of Columbia are just now waking up to. Not coincidentally, this new education war is hitting less than a month after Obama’s re-election, just in time to prevent the public from taking the most effective step it could have to block the changes. You have to get nearly to the end of today’s Post article even to get a hint of the fact that Obama is the real force behind the new curriculum. Following that link takes you to an article that more frankly lays out Obama’s role in commandeering the substance of what’s taught in the nation’s schools. The print version of this September 21, 2012 article featured a more revealing headline than the web version: “Education overhaul largely bypasses Congress.”
Read the rest at National Review and everything else from Stanley Kurtz.
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Common Core did not originate with the WH, or Obama, or even the Ed dept. The initiatives for Common Core started in the various states.
Also, teachers misunderstand the “mandate” on non-fiction. For one thing the requirement by Common Core for more non-fiction is not just confined to English and lit classes, but also history and science. Whether English teachers actually have to reduce the amount of fiction they assign remains to be seen.
You would look less foolish and alarmist if you simply pointed out that Obama could highjack what is meant to be a sound concept that is intended to actually make students understand the content they are assigned, and understand it in depth, and prove their level of knowledge. Leftists could indeed disseminate more propaganda via the increased non-fiction requirements of Common Core. But what is the real problem then? Common Core or the leftist/statist grip on education?
One other more important issue, and the one that may well kill Common Core, is the fact that the literacy rate and reading comprehension rates of a whole lot of American public school students is abysmal, so they are not at all ready for the 2014 “start” date for Common Core. Teachers are in a panic about this in many scholl districts, or so I hear.
As to this being a push for a “national curiculum?” I hear you; that is definitely an issue.
As you say, the real danger is in having it hijacked to move an agenda “forward”.
Are you familiar with Napoleon’s “Imperial Catechism”? It is illustrative as to what can be forced on children by a megalomaniac, and there are probably other examples from other dictators.
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1806catechism-napoleon.asp
Personally, I would prefer that the kids were taught about the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, the Federalist Papers, or, Heaven forbid, the U.S. Constitution, instead of once again using something with Obama’s stench as its very essence so that he can rise to immortality.
If you want to know more about the insidious dangers of Common Core, read here:
http://www.trevorloudon.com/2012/09/terrorist-professor-bill-ayers-and-obamas-federal-school-curriculum/
This is a natural leftist progression…..healthcare first, now education. Conservatives better wake up and get involved in their local communities to beat back this leftist onslaught.
Ummm, I think his point was not where the Common Core curriculum originated, but that Congress has passed no law or act to bring it into being as a National curriculum…
Literacy rate and reading comprehension…unfortunately it’s even worse than you might think…which is a very bad thing for students of normal intelligence, and a total disaster for the bright ones.
I am superficially familiar with common core and I don’t find it insidious. It is designed to address something with which we are familiar: the ability for today’s recent graduates to comprehend material is abysmal. It also manages to stay pretty generic, focusing on skills rather than material so it is open to interpretation. I can’t see Obama writing anything that is both logical and open to interpretation.
I would not be surprised to find out he IS trying to take over the public school system, but I wouldn’t blame that on core standards but on the blatant power grabs he is known for. Why be subtle when he can do it by executive order or whatever other extra-constitutional method he likes?
Thank you. My points are similar.
Common Core is Bill Ayers’ indoctrination for children
Comprehension isn’t about reading so much as it is about teaching kids to think. We won’t have better comprehension until we start teaching critical thinking, cause and effect, logic, etc., again. Yes, you can use non-fiction materials to help you teach those skills, but you can also use fiction.
So, this won’t work because the last thing leftists want is to teach kids how to actually think.
I am a long time high school English teacher in a state that has enthusiastically adopted Common Core. Rest easy, America lovers, I could not give a rip about the mandates of Common Core. I will continue to teach exactly what I have always taught: American and Englsh literature, emphasizing the greatness of the cultures that produced said literature. My students read deeply in Jefferson, Paine, and Frankln and are currently finishing up Poe. Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman are coming their way after Christmas. I am not the only one keeping the light shining either. I will stick to my cultural guns until I retire. I have nothing but contempt for the dim-witted edu-crats and intense devotion for teaching my students about the American philosophy of excellence and achievement.
Good for you Cal!
The irony is: Common Core is meant by its sincere adherents and developers to do what you already have done. It would have been far preferrable had there been many more teachers and school systems who think and act as you do rather than develop a “pre-packaged” concept for national dissemination because of natin-wide public school failure. While I am defending Common Core in this thread, it is mainly to counter the reflexive hysteria that I see where people are attacking the wrong target simply because this White House is involved. Over at “Powerline” they’re even selling the canard that Common Core originated in the White House. This is nonsense. I wish certain “conservative” pundits would stop making fools of themselves on this issue. They have fallen prey to a cascading effect of alarmism.
Common Core’s principles are not the problem (quite the opposite), but the harnessing of this “re-packaged” attempt to return to traditional rigorous teaching to the agenda of The State is the problem. If Mr. Kurtz would write an honest piece his title would be “take Common Core back from Obama and The State!” or words to that effect.