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Post Common-Core Education

AlaskaBushPilot

Illuminator
Joined
Nov 6, 2010
Messages
4,341
Common Core is dead. Betsy DeVos gave the official epitaph months ago here:

https://www.myajc.com/blog/get-schooled/betsy-devos-common-core-dead-department-education/cQzYu1G8fauL6KPp41aVgJ/

We fell to 40th in Math on the PISA tests with the help of Common Core. Math was the area receiving the most complaints by parents. This was presaged by the most pertinent member of the math standards committee resigning and doing nationwide campaigning against the common core.

But it is over now. The so-called Every Student Succeeds Act, lol - that's just preciously hilarious political sloganeering. But what it did was snip the tie between federal funding and any national standard, like Common Core.

I'd say the first thing in the way of any kind of reform that matters is self-awareness. Students and parents are carefully kept ignorant of how we're doing vis-a-vis our international competition.

Everyone gets socially promoted. Everyone gets a high school diploma now, just for attending. The special ed kids too. Especially them, in fact. Our whole approach is teaching to the bottom. Where, as this article points out, $7 Billion of extra funding has no effect whatsoever.

In the meantime the Asians know exactly what their international standing is. Just having that awareness invokes a competitive spirit in them. It motivates them.

So by graduation you have the kids from Shanghai four academic years ahead of my local school.

The kids don't know any better than to judge themselves by their peers when adults conceal the rest of the world from them. So it is quite a shock to graduate high school and find yourself looking like a moron compared to a dirt-poor Vietnamese kid who attended a thatch hut for school.

Competition energizes people. It gives them purpose. It raises their performance. The reason we squealch the competitive spirit is this misguided idea it is unfair to stupider people.

No it isn't. It's unfair to everyone else, that they are thrown unprepared into a world of vastly higher competition. All that extra money and attention to the lowest IQ cohort was to no effect, and the people with brains were held back.

Admitting you have a problem is the first step to recovery.
 
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Not to mention that students who cannot read for learning by around fourth grade or so - and test out that way - can pretty much never be able to read well enough to follow even high school texts much less higher education ones. Yet the teachers, who follow the instructions for instruction get the blame when the students (who can't read for learning) fail or barely pass classes that require reading at at least grade level.

Part of the problem is that for a rather large number of students(U S) the amount of reading material of any sort in their homes is vanishingly small.

And, last, from my end (high school science - Bio, Chem, Physics, Env. Sci and Gen Sci - all certified) that means we are getting students who, according to the research we get quoted to us at many meetings, cannot learn to read for learning IF they have not reached that level/skill by fourth grade - followed by giving us a lecture on the need for us to teach them that anyway (i.e. pretend you are working out the problem no one can work out so it looks better than it is (you may interpret that any way you prefer).
 
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