Is Common Core Wrecking the American Mind?

How do you like your rhetoric for breakfast? Do you like it straight up or with butter and maple syrup. Do you prefer some fruit compote on the side? And, how about some bacon? OK, you probably just like your rhetoric hot… and musical. It’s fun to be moved by the dulcet tones of a great orator, even more so when he is a demagogue. Until you get the bill....

The topic du jour is the Common Core school curriculum. Allan Bloom notwithstanding the American mind is more shut down than ever. But now, with the advent of Common Core, the mind of America's school children is being wrecked, with the best of intentions.

Instituted with great fanfare by President Obama, supported to the hilt by Bill Gates, promoted by Jeb Bush, Arne Duncan and a band of notables, Common Core has failed miserably. We have already reported on the results of the ACT tests-- discouraging-- and are happy to add a point that Joy Pullmann makes in The Federalist, namely  that ACT and SAT tests have been rejiggered to play to Common Core topics, subject matter and standards. Still, America’s schoolchildren are not improving their academic performance. They still cannot compete against their peers around the world.

As Pullmann points out Common Core was yet another Obama era scam. She quotes the lofty rhetoric of our last president:

If you set and enforce rigorous and challenging standards and assessments; if you put outstanding teachers at the front of the classroom; if you turn around failing schools — your state can win a Race to the Top grant that will not only help students outcompete workers around the world, but let them fulfill their God-given potential….

He added that Common Core would:

...not only make America’s entire education system the envy of the world, but we will launch a Race to the Top that will prepare every child, everywhere in America, for the challenges of the 21st century.

How could anyone resist the lure of a program that would solve all of America's educational problems. Besides, Obama was a great orator... one who inspired hope, but not much else.

Obama was not alone in selling the empty promise of Common Core:

Think tankers Michael Petrilli and Robert Pondiscio wrote to West Virginians in 2015 that “The Common Core should help to boost college readiness — and college completion — by significantly raising expectations.” Jeb Bush wrote in National Review in 2013, “To compete with the rest of the world, we must produce competitive high-school graduates. That means we have to make sure that the skills they are learning are aligned with what employers and colleges expect high-school graduates to know…the Common Core State Standards, set an ambitious and voluntary goal line.”

“If young people today are to be productive adults in the knowledge economy, they need standards that truly prepare them for college and careers,” Obama education secretary Arne Duncan said in a 2010 speech touting Common Core. “We will end what has become a race to the bottom in our schools and instead spur a race to the top by encouraging better standards and assessments,” President Obama said in 2009. “Standards” is jargon for Common Core.

How’s that working out? Of course, it is working out poorly. American schoolchildren are less prepared and less competent than their peers around the world. This ensure that they will gravitate toward government programs that will take care of them, because they know that they cannot really compete in the marketplace and take care of themselves.

Pullmann offers this sobering assessment, via a Harvard professor:

During the Obama administration, writes Harvard professor Paul Peterson, “No substantively significant nationwide gains were registered for any of the three racial and ethnic groupings in math or reading at either 4th or 8th grade.”

If Common Core has not improved academic achievement, but has dumbed down both the curriculum and students themselves, what has it accomplished? Well, Pullmann remarks, it has turned the school system into an indoctrination mill:

Just recently, Rick Hess and Grant Addison wrote about what’s happened to people who have worked for and led organizations that received millions from Obama’s Common Core grants and from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which also bankrolled Common Core. At its annual Standards Institute, a prominent conference to teach teachers how to teach Common Core, the organization UnboundEd “slathers its Common Core workshops with race-based rancor and junk science,” providing a “snapshot…into the ongoing transformation of ‘school reform.'”

To keep their teaching licenses, many teachers have to regularly attend conferences like these for usually taxpayer-sponsored “professional development.” Nowadays teacher licensing mandates often specifically require teachers to learn Common Core-themed things. So basically, to keep their jobs, teachers have to learn more about Common Core.

Hess and Addison elaborated on the indoctrination aspect:

UnboundEd’s training in reading and math instruction is ‘grounded in conversations about the roles that race, bias and prejudice play in our schools and classrooms.’ Its Standards Institute prepares educators to be ‘Equity Change-Agents.’ To become one, participants are told, they must first acknowledge that ‘we are part of a systematically racist system of education.’

It sounds like they are more interested in producing lifelong Democrats than teaching children how to compete in the world markets.

After noting that the problems with America’s educational system predated Common Core, Pullmann concludes that Common Core, with the best of intentions, has merely made things worse:

Common Core sucked all the energy, money, and motivation right out of desperately needed potential reforms to U.S. public schools for a decade, and for nothing. It’s more money right down our nation’s gigantic debt hole, another generation lost to sickening ignorance, another set of corrupt bureaucrats‘ careers and bank accounts built out of the wreckage of American minds.

Yet Obama went on stage last week and yukked it up about how Donald Trump goes around “blatantly, repeatedly, baldly, shamelessly lying.” The man who sold us Common Core, who knew we couldn’t keep our doctors and kept on promising we could, who lied umpteen ways to Sunday about his Iran deal and myriad other policies — he’s sure got a lot of nerve. And obviously not a lick of self-awareness, yet alone shame.

Remember this utter debacle next time somebody comes knocking with the “next big idea” for your kids and wallets. Hide them both, and run the huckster outta town.