Ten years of Common Core have been a disaster -studies - Monica Showalter

​
by Monica Showalter

The Obama administration praised it and the Washington Post called it one of Obama's top legacies, but now the results are in. It's time to dump this.

When Common Core first crept upon us from the Gates Foundation and other coevals, and then came into being in most states for real in 2010, it was hailed as just the thing to turn the tide on America's falling educational standards. 

President Obama's longtime education secretary, Arne Duncan hailed it as this:

"the Common Core State Standards may prove to be the single greatest thing to happen to public education in America since Brown v. Board of Education."

The Washington Post praised it as an Obama legacy thang - here's its headline:

Obama’s real education legacy: Common Core, testing, charter schools

Obama himself claimed it made everything so much better:

So bottom line is: higher graduation rates, higher college attendance rates, more money for Pell grants and work to make sure that the interest rate on student loans haven’t gone up; working to expand early childhood education and preschool; continuing to watch and work with states as they try to implement reforms to make K-12 better; holding colleges more accountable for giving information so that students can make good decisions. We’ve made a lot of progress. We have made a lot of progress in terms of making sure that young people across the country get the kind of great education that you’re getting here at Banneker.

Ten years on, the results are in, and it's a disaster.

Here's a report from Breitbart:

A study released Monday by the Boston-based Pioneer Institute reveals a historic drop in national reading and math scores among U.S. students since the adoption of the Common Core Curriculum Standards a decade ago.
“Nearly a decade after states adopted Common Core, the empirical evidence makes it clear that these national standards have yielded underwhelming results for students,” said Pioneer executive director Jim Stergios in a statement. “The proponents of this expensive, legally questionable policy initiative have much to answer for.”

Here's another from U.S. News, citing a different study from a completely different group:

MATH AND READING SCORES for fourth- and eighth-graders in the United States dropped since 2017, and the decrease in reading achievement has government researchers particularly concerned.

"Over the past decade, there has been no progress in either mathematics or reading performance, and the lowest performing students are doing worse," Peggy Carr, associate commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, said during a press call Tuesday.

The 2019 National Assessment of Education Progress, also called NAEP or the Nation's Report Card, was administered to more than 600,000 students enrolled in public schools and Catholic schools from every state and Washington, D.C., and also includes a break-out of student achievement in 27 large urban school districts.

Most notable were the score drops in reading, which occurred in 17 states with regard to fourth grade reading scores and in 31 states for eighth grade reading scores. On average, reading scores declined for fourth graders by 1 point and for eighth graders by 3 points compared to 2017.

Same miserable finding. 

So much for letting the federal government run things, as is the socialist programmatic scheme. Far from being the greatest thing in education, the 'game changer' as Obama himself said, it actually was pretty problematic from the start. 

It had a one-size-fits-all standard that everyone was supposed to follow like worker ants, which just by its very nature opened the gates to political correctness. There also was the problem with the tests themselves, which incentivized teachers to just 'teach to the test.' Why learn about who George Washington was when all you have to do is teach kids to remember to check the box that said he was America's first president? Move on, back to the video games and womyn's studies lectures.

It's a classic case of top-down government, one size fits all standards turning out exactly the same way every other centrally planned socially engineered government plan of action ends up. 

When a government program fails that badly, common sense says to say it's had its chance, now it's time to throw it out. A kid who flunk[s] his exams gets his penalties, so should government programs which clearly fail. When something fails, you get rid of it. We know the Trump administration is hostile to it, but we still don't see it gone. It's time to get it gone, before another generation gets even worse results than this one.


Monica Showalter

Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/common_core_tried_for_10_years_and_found_wanting_time_to_dump_it.html

Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter