Wednesday, September 23, 2020

A Man without Shame

Of course, it was all a lie. The lofty promises and the thrilling rhetoric about Common Core educational reform have produced yet another great failure.

Thanks to the Obama administration and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation America’s schoolchildren have suffered nine years of Common Core education. These children have lost ground academically. They can barely read or do math. They are falling behind their peers around the world.


But, if you are looking for the worst part, Common Core reformers are using the program to indoctrinate children in the dogmas of anti-racism.


Joy Pullmann explains the results of standardized tests:


ACT scores released earlier this month show that students’ math achievement is at a 20-year low. The latest English ACT scores are slightly down since 2007, and students’ readiness for college-level English was at its lowest level since ACT’s creators began measuring that item, in 2002. Students’ preparedness for college-level math is at its lowest point since 2004.


SAT scores also dropped post-Common Core until it fully implemented a new version tailored for Common Core. How convenient. Even after the test was overhauled to match Common Core, average test scores increased by 0.7 percent in the most recent results. It represents almost no difference to pre-Common Core results, and the public can’t know exactly how the scores were recentered and altered, either.


In all the previous SAT overhauls, average scores technically went up but statistical analyses show they’ve actually been steadily losing ground over the past 60 years. In other words, the SAT has a history of score inflation, and Common Core is doing nothing to reverse that.


Score inflation, tailoring tests to compensate for children’s incompetence-- how is that going to make America more competitive.


Pullmann concludes:


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.


Unfortunately, at our current historical juncture, the media will never, ever call out Obama, on his lie or on his failed policies. A man without shame, Pullmann aptly calls him.

10 comments:

urbane legend said...

Obama is one of the biggest frauds ever foisted on America, a con man of exceptional skill. That we, that is, the country, elected him a second time, knowing what he was, is beyond me.

Sociopath; isn't that the profile he fits?

Giordano Bruno said...

And what group is always at the bottom of the education ladder and at the top of the violent crime ladder? Maybe they always vote for the party that delivers them nothing but misery because they are too dumb to grasp their circumstance? They actually cannot understand how to get out of it.

David Foster said...

"America’s schoolchildren have suffered nine years of Common Core education. These children have lost ground academically. They can barely read or do math. They are falling behind their peers around the world."

Yet...from everything I've read and heard...virtually *all* the K-12 time, at least in the early grades, is devoted to math and reading, to the virtual exclusion of science, history, art, etc. Perhaps the emphasis on these subjects (in terms of time spent) is past the point of diminishing returns, and something about the way they are being taught causes the teaching *just not to work*, regardless of the time dedicated or the $ spent.

Part of the problem, though surely not all, is classroom disruption. There is research suggesting that a single disruptive student can have long-term negative impact on all the other students in the class. And, due in part to Obama-era 'reforms', it has become a lot more difficult to get disruptive students out of the classroom.

Sam L. said...

The "educrats" need to be taken to the woodshed and then dumped into the outhouse(s).

Giordano Bruno said...

Richard Mitchell said all there was to say on the matter almost 40 years ago. He said it was bad and going to get worse and explained why the schools could not teach and the students could not learn. He said you could spend 20 times more and it would not make one bit of difference. He was right, and trillions later, we are still at it, in the same way, with the same depressing results.

Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCD said...

It’s all because of the test. The test sucks, man...

Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCD said...

Gio, you’re so cynical. You fail to realize that it’s a GOOD kind of misery...

That’s all.

You gots be woke, blood.

Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCD said...

"America’s schoolchildren have suffered nine years of Common Core education. These children have lost ground academically. They can barely read or do math. They are falling behind their peers around the world."

I wonder how Bill Gates and Jeb! Bush would respond to that. They think Common Core is nifty!

Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCD said...

Gio, Mitchell said what specifically was bad?

Giordano Bruno said...

“There is only one Education, and it has only one goal: the freedom of the mind. Anything that needs an adjective, be it civics education, or socialist education, or Christian education, or whatever-you-like education, is not education, and it has some different goal. The very existence of modified "educations" is testimony to the fact that their proponents cannot bring about what they want in a mind that is free. An "education" that cannot do its work in a free mind, and so must "teach" by homily and precept in the service of these feelings and attitudes and beliefs rather than those, is pure and unmistakable tyranny. ”
― Richard Mitchell

In sum, Mitchell said we have no idea what education might mean. It's just an empty word we trot out and assume it has meaning because we trotted it out. Science is now in the same category. Just hollow words for midwits to think it accomplishes something because you used it. Would give you some better quotes, but books are a mess right now. If you listen to the inanities and jargon of the modern educrat (he used the term regularly) you already know the enterprise is doomed no matter how much they spend.

“That's how ideas and the institutions they generate come to be in the first place. It is in strings of words that we make ideas. The words, however, can say anything that the language permits, which, in our case, is quite a lot, so a string of words can just as easily express inanities as ideas. When inanities are expressed, we can discover them just by paying attention to the words.”
― Richard Mitchell, Less Than Words Can Say