Common Core: K-16 Education?

Right around this time of the fall semester, after I’d returned the first batch of papers, I’d hear the complaint from my college freshmen: “But I got all A’s in high school English!” My colleagues heard it too, but our response was, “But you’re in college now.”

Because of the latest developments under Common Core, we can now expect the student to challenge the professor and say, “But that’s not what I learned in high school!”

And he will have the full weight of the college administration, the state college authorities, and the federal government on his side to rule over the professor.

This is because a number of colleges, university systems, and education organizations have joined the Orwellian named group, Higher Ed for Higher Standards, who describe themselves as “a growing coalition of college and university leaders from across the country who believe that college-and-career-ready standards, including the Common Core State Standards, are critical to improving student success in K-12 and beyond.

“Education leaders,” as far as I can determine by reading missives from the Department of Education, are those who follow bureaucratic dictates.

These educational leaders are usurping the independent role of college faculty. According to the Hechinger Report, a number of these colleges have required faculty members to attend workshops this summer to revise their introductory courses to “synch up” with Common Core standards.

Proponents have insisted that Common Core would simply provide consistent standards (determined by Common Core tests, so far in math and English Language Arts) that would ensure that students across the country were “college-and-career-ready.” Now that the deal has been done, with Common Core law in over 40 states, outlets, like the Hechinger Report, are admitting that Common Core is a “massive overhaul of U.S. primary and secondary education.” It is also turning out to be an overhaul of higher education, or as it is now commonly called, K-16.

That includes the decision-making ability of colleges to place students in certain classes, including non-credit-bearing remedial classes. Jacqueline King, director of Higher Education Collaboration at SBAC, one of the two consortia designing and administering Common Core exams, brags that once students have been determined to be “college ready” through their Common Core tests, they will be guaranteed placement in credit-bearing courses. Up until this point, the bar has been set by higher education in terms of what entering freshmen must know. High schools boasted about the number of graduates going to college, and which colleges.

This massive shift in the relationship between K-12 and higher education sent a shock through the system of this Ph.D. in English, who for twenty years, until very recently, taught classes as a part-time instructor.

Common Core will spell the doom of higher education in the true sense of the term, in what motivated those like me to scurry between campuses to teach as many as five labor-intensive introductory courses for ridiculously low wages instead of gaining decent and steady remuneration by teaching high school, as some of my fellow graduate students did in the 1990s.

Of course, I would have preferred a tenure-track position. But that was not to be. Like many of my fellow conservatives I took what I could get as a part-time instructor.

It’s difficult to explain to those more pragmatically minded what compels us to do this.

Much of it has to do with the pursuit of learning for its own sake and having the freedom to determine how we teach. I was entrusted with grading papers and making assignments. Even when I was assigned a textbook, I could choose the plays, essays, and poems I wanted to teach, and I could add supplemental material. Other than the occasional classroom visit from the department chair or a review of a batch of papers, I was on my own. Were I a full-time faculty member I would have had a role in proposing and approving new courses, hiring and promoting faculty, and determining admissions standards.

Even though some of my students did not know the basics of grammar, I felt free to try to inspire them to higher levels. I was setting the bar for them. We would read Shakespeare and Donne. Students would write college-level essays and research papers, I insisted.

As I prepared for class by reading and making lecture notes, I would think how lucky to have to reread Hamlet, a Flannery O’Connor short story, or Washington’s “Farewell Address,” discover new revelations to share in class, and perhaps in a piece of my own writing. One thing was for sure: I had no bureaucrat breathing down my neck, telling me to cross every t, ensure every “outcome,” and make sure that the students had met standards written by people who had more experience in education theory and acquiring grants than real education.

This was in contrast to the regimented routine of high school, where “standards” were set by the state (and now federal government), where one had to fill out reams of paperwork to keep up with increasing regulations, where one had to read the dreadfully dull literature put out by committees on discipline, achievement goals, and cooked-up pedagogical theories. And there is the fact that one is dealing with children who need basic instruction, including in behavior. Those who teach K-12 have an essentially different set of motivations and goals. It’s important work, but it’s not higher education.

But now those who teach college will have to “synch up” to Common Core. A more accurate term would be “synch down”; for example, one of the strategies taught to professors this summer was to include interdisciplinary reading and writing. This really means incorporating “informational texts” like many that have replaced literature in high school English classes under Common Core. Good-bye, Shakespeare. Hello, HVAC (Heating, Ventilating and Air Conditioning) specs and polemics on the minimum wage.

For freshman composition, once a subject intended to ensure that students could write academic papers, we can expect the short writing assignments, video presentations, and group demonstrations of “listening and speaking skills” of Common Core. The focus on “close reading” and “scaffolding” will mean that college students will read short passages in groups, instead of longer reading assignments on their own.

It will be like teaching grade 13, and it will be the final stake in higher education.

http://townhall.com/columnists/marygrabar/2014/10/03/common-core-k16-education-n1900148/page/full

The new New Math: Byzantine subtraction in Common Core

hen I went to school, I may not have been the math whiz that my son the Mathemagician turned out to be, but I didn’t really have any trouble learning subtraction by, y’know … subtracting. Apparently that’s so passé as to be called the Granny Method in a new Common Core-compliant textbook. Our colleague Erick Erickson found this instruction on subtraction in his daughter’s third-grade textbook that almost looks like intentional satire:

The picture above is from my third grade daughter’s math book. This is the only page that explains that method for subtraction. There are, for the record, four ways to subtract that my third grader must learn.

This is the only page explaining that method. This is the only example. The very next page goes to arrays. The page after that goes to multiplication. This is it.

The traditional method of subtracting, borrowing and carrying numbers, is derisively called the “Granny Method.” The new method makes no freaking sense to either my third grader or my wife.

We send our child to a Christian private school. We thought our child could escape this madness. But standardized tests, the SAT, and the ACT are all moving over to Common Core. So our child has to learn this insanity. But we cannot help her. The book offers only one example.

I’m pretty good with patterns, so I see what the intent is with this method. It’s to build the answer through a series of additions, taking four steps on paper plus a number of cognitive judgments along the way. What I can’t see is why anyone would ever need to use this method to actually subtract one number from another. In the old New Math, breaking equations down into components based on the places in the numbers could boost understanding of algebra and help one learn to do more complex equations in the head. That’s clearly not the case here — the “counting-up method” requires a paper calculation and more complicated cognitive judgments than simply subtracting and carrying over. Furthermore, as one of Erick’s commenters noted, even if one argues that it prepares children for higher math functions, how do you deal with negative numbers using this method?

As Erick concludes, the only possible value in putting this in a textbook is just that it’s new. I’m all for new when new improves on old, but … this is sheer nonsense.

Famous mathematician and humorist Tom Lehrer lampooned “New Math” in the 1960s. Now this looks like the good ol’ days.

http://hotair.com/archives/2014/10/01/the-new-new-math-byzantine-subtraction-in-common-core/

WATCH: PARENTS VOICE COMMON CORE FRUSTRATIONS IN NEW DOCUMENTARY

Parents, teachers, and a social worker are interviewed in a new documentary titled The Parent Interviews, in which they describe their experiences and those of their children and students with the Common Core standards. 

Published by the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) and filmmaker Ian Reid, the film, a follow-up to a prior documentary called Building the Machine, exposes the frustration of parents with the Common Core’s tendency to place unrealistic, non-age appropriate expectations on their young children, transforming school from a rewarding learning experience to a high stakes, high stress environment.

In a press release, Reid said:

We were really happy with the response to the Building the Machine film. Most viewers felt that it was an excellent primer on the standards and their questionable background, but many also expressed that they wanted a more in-depth look at the Common Core and how the standards have impacted parents and children. In response to those requests, we’ve put together an additional 20-minute documentary featuring parent interviews from the state of New York and six content-specific episodes that explore issues such as international benchmarking, high-stakes testing, datamining and more.

The Parent Interviews can be viewed free online from October 1-7, and is included in the complete edition of Building the Machine, available at HSLDA.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/10/02/Watch-Parents-Voice-Frustrations-With-Common-Core-Standards-in-New-Documentary

How the College Board Politicized U.S. History?, The Wrong Side of AP History

The College Board, the private company that produces the SAT test and the various Advanced Placement (AP) exams, has kicked off a national controversy by issuing a new and unprecedentedly detailed “Framework” for its AP U.S. History exam. This Framework will effectively force American high schools to teach U.S. history from a leftist perspective. The College Board disclaims political intent, insisting that the new Framework provides a “balanced” guide that merely helps to streamline the AP U.S. History course while enhancing teacher flexibility. Not only the Framework itself, but the history of its development suggests that a balanced presentation of the American story was not the College Board’s goal.

The origins of the new AP U.S. History framework are closely tied to a movement of left-leaning historians that aims to “internationalize” the teaching of American history. The goal is to “end American history as we have known it” by substituting a more “transnational” narrative for the traditional account.

This movement’s goals are clearly political, and include the promotion of an American foreign policy that eschews the unilateral use of force. The movement to “internationalize” the U.S. History curriculum also seeks to produce a generation of Americans more amendable to working through the United Nations and various left-leaning “non-governmental organizations” (NGOs) on issues like the environment and nuclear proliferation. A willingness to use foreign law to interpret the U.S. Constitution is likewise encouraged.

The College Board formed a close alliance with this movement to internationalize the teaching of American history just prior to initiating its redesign of the AP U.S. History exam. Key figures in that alliance are now in charge of the AP U.S. History redesign process, including the committee charged with writing the new AP U.S. History exam. The new AP U.S. History Framework clearly shows the imprint of the movement to de-nationalize American history. Before I trace the rise of this movement and its ties to the College Board, let’s have a closer look at its goals.

NYU historian Thomas Bender is the leading spokesman for the movement to internationalize the U.S. History curriculum at every educational level. The fullest and clearest statement of Bender’s views can be found in his 2006 book, A Nation Among Nations: America’s Place in World History. Bender is a thoroughgoing critic of American exceptionalism, the notion that America is freer and more democratic than any other nation, and for that reason, a model, vindicator, and at times the chief defender of ordered liberty and self-government in the world.

In opposition to this, Bender wants to subordinate American identity to a cosmopolitan, “transnational” sensibility. Bender urges us to see each nation, our own included, as but “a province among the provinces that make up the world.” Whereas the old U.S. history forged a shared national identity by emphasizing America’s distinctiveness, Bender hopes to encourage cosmopolitanism by “internationalizing” the American story.

Bender laments that history as taught in our schools has bred an “acceptance of the nation as the dominant form of human solidarity.” The growing focus on gender, race, and ethnicity is welcome, says Bender, but does little to transform an underlying historical narrative built around the nation. Even the rise of world history in the schools has backfired, Bender maintains, by making it appear as though American history and world history are somehow different topics.

Bender understands that his transnational twist on American history has profound political implications. He complains that while working on his book (during George W. Bush’s presidency), “a discourse of exceptionalism and policies based on it became omnipresent in American public life.” Bender promises that his transnational framing of American history “will give little comfort” to the proponents of policies based on American exceptionalism.

He worries, however, that his globalizing approach to American history might be used to defend precisely the sort of “hegemonic” American foreign-policy he abhors. To prevent this, Bender urges that American history be taught, not only from an American point of view, but from the perspective of those who are subject to American power. “Americans have always found it difficult to imagine themselves as an enemy, as a problem for other people,” says Bender. By showing us ourselves through our enemies’ eyes, Bender hopes to promote humbler and more collaborative forms of American foreign-policy.

Bender complains about George W. Bush era foreign policy, not only in respect to war, but also in the matters of, “environment, trade, nuclear, and other policies.” Clearly, he hopes that his anti-exceptionalist vision of American-history will encourage a different approach to foreign affairs. Bender also openly hopes that students exposed to a less “national” version of American history will sympathize with Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s willingness to use foreign law to interpret the U.S. Constitution, rather than with Justice Antonin Scalia’s rejection of foreign law as an arbiter of American jurisprudence.

In 2006, A Nation Among Nations provoked a sharp exchange between Bender and Brooklyn College professor of history, Robert David Johnson in the journal Historically Speaking. Going on the attack, Johnson calls Bender’s “transnational” version of American history, “little more than an attempt to ensure that students think a certain way about contemporary events.” Johnson warns Bender that “establishing as an outcome for high school history classes the judicial philosophy of Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer . . . will undermine support for public education among citizens who disagree with the preferred ideology.”

Bender parries Johnson’s charges of politicization with a non-denial denial. I offer no “rules for specific actions in the world,” says Bender, nor is my book about “any specific foreign policy.” But Bender doesn’t have to write a policy brief. To achieve his preferred policy results, he merely needs to inculcate a cosmopolitan sensibility and an abiding hostility to American exceptionalism. Bender also denies Johnson’s claim that he wants to “merge” high school U.S. history with World history, yet Bender clearly wants to integrate them in a way that subordinates the American national story to the transnational, globalist perspective.

To understand the deep entanglement of the College Board in Bender’s political and intellectual project, we need to return to 2000, when a group of 78 historians under the auspices of the Organization of American Historians (OAH) issued the flagship document of the movement to “internationalize” American history, “The La Pietra Report.” Bender authored that report, and it prefigures all the themes he develops in his later writings.

The report takes its name from the Italian villa where the meetings took place, from 1997 to 2000. The La Pietra Report makes much of the fact that those meetings were held outside the United States, and that nearly a third of the scholars working to forge a new U.S. History curriculum were non-Americans. One such scholar, in fact, was Cuban.

Francesca Lopez Civeira, of the University of Havana, participated in absentia, sending a paper on American power as “an object of fear” in Cuban historiography. That fit squarely into a central theme of the La Pietra Report, which urges that American students be exposed to evidence of the “controversial power and presence” of the United States beyond our borders, to the point where “one’s native land seems foreign.”

In common with Bender’s later work, an interim report on the 1998 La Pietra conference warns that a newly internationalized American history could inadvertently create a new “…American global city on a hill, the new model for a global culture and economy. There is a danger of a triumphalism that this history could fall into, thus becoming the ideological justification for the latest phase of capitalism.” Again, the La Pietra scholars try to prevent an internationalized history from justifying America’s global economic and military reach by focusing on how America’s alleged victims and enemies feel about the use of our power.

A conclave of historians with a left-wing foreign policy agenda, a third of them from foreign countries, seems an odd inspiration for the ostensibly non-partisan College Board’s redesign of the AP U.S. History Exam. Yet that is exactly what the La Pietra conference and its report became.

In 2002, two years after the appearance of the La Pietra Report, Rethinking American History in a Global Age, a collection of representative papers from the La Pietra conference was published, with Bender as its editor. At the same moment, the Organization of American Historians, which had sponsored the La Pietra Report, moved to strengthen its collaborative relationship with the College Board’s AP U.S. History program. This led to the formation in 2003 of a Joint OAH/AP Advisory Board on Teaching the U.S. History Survey Course. This Advisory Board focused its efforts on fulfilling the goals of the La Pietra Report. So by forging an alliance with the College Board, Bender and his allies discovered a way to transform the teaching of U.S. history.

Ted Dickson, who served as Co-Chair of the AP U.S. History Curriculum Development and Assessment Committee (the body that wrote the new AP U.S. History Framework), was an original member of the joint panel seeking to advance the goals of the La Pietra Report.

In June of 2004, just as the Joint OAH/AP Advisory Board was searching for ways to reshape the teaching of U.S. history along “transnational” lines, Thomas Bender was invited to address hundreds of readers gathered to grade the essay portion of that year’s AP U.S. History Exam. Bender’s talk, still available at the AP Central website, reflects his political agenda. Speaking in the wake of the American invasion of Iraq, Bender argues that historians who offer narratives of American exceptionalism “bear some responsibility” for reinforcing “a unilateralist understanding of the United States in the world.” That attitude, says Bender, must be fought.

Offering an alternative, transnational history designed to combat American “unilateralism,” Bender says that Columbus and his successors didn’t discover America so much as they discovered “the ocean world,” a new global community united by the oceans. The oceans, in turn, made possible the slave trade and the birth of modern capitalism, which improved the lives of European, but brought exploitation and tragic injustice to the rest of the world. Bender concludes that early American history is only partially about “utopian dreams of opportunity or escape”. The beginnings of the American story, says Bender, are also deeply rooted in the birth of capitalism, and the “capture, constraint, and exploitation” this implies.

In other words, Bender wants early American history to be less about the Pilgrims, Plymouth Colony, and John Winthrop’s “City on a Hill” speech, and more about the role of the plantation economy and the slave trade in the rise of an intrinsically exploitative international capitalism. 

If the College Board didn’t fully understand the political agenda behind Bender’s La Pietra Report before his talk to the AP Exam readers, they had to understand it after. Yet instead of distancing themselves from this highly politicized and left-leaning approach to American history, the College Board redoubled its efforts on Bender’s behalf.

The OAH-AP Joint Advisory Board decided to publish a collection of essays that would serve as a how-to manual for adopting the recommendations of Bender’s La Pietra Report. So, for example, a scholarly essay on American “cultural imperialism” would be paired with a piece by a high school teacher explaining how the topic of American cultural imperialism could be adapted to the AP U.S. History course. Ted Dickson, future co-chair of the committee that actually wrote the new Framework, was chosen to co-edit this book, which was published in 2008 as America on the World Stage: A Global Approach to U.S. History. Thomas Bender wrote an introduction to the book explaining the philosophy behind the La Pietra Report.

A bit of the material in America on the World Stage—an essay on international responses to the Declaration of Independence, for example—could backfire on Bender by reinforcing an American exceptionalist narrative. Most of the essays in America on the World Stage, however, read like deconstructions of the American story, or catalogues of (alleged) American shame.

Consider the treatment of immigration, which was written by Florida State University historian, Suzanne Sinke, who co-chaired (with Ted Dickson) the committee that wrote the new AP U.S. History Framework. Sinke tells the tale of an early 20^th Century ethnically Dutch woman who immigrated to America, merely to leave and go elsewhere. Traditional historians would not treat this woman as an American “immigrant” at all. And that’s the point. Sinke emphasizes that her goal in telling the story of a woman who merely passed through America without deciding to stay and become a citizen is to teach us “to think beyond national histories and the terms that are caught up in them.”

Ted Dickson’s companion piece on how to teach Sinke’s essay (co-authored with Louisa Bond Moffitt), suggests asking students why the term “migration” might be preferable to “immigration.” The answer is that “immigration” implies a specific and permanent national destination, whereas “migration” is simply about the movement of people across borders, without any reference to adopting a national identity. The political subtext is clear: national interest and national identity take second place to the interests of individual “migrants,” whose loyalties are ultimately “transnational.”

So just before they became co-chairs of the committee that redesigned the AP U.S. History Framework, Suzanne Sinke and Ted Dickson worked closely together on a project whose goal was to reshape the U.S. History Survey Course along the lines recommended by Thomas Bender and the La Pietra Report.

Lawrence Charap, the College Board’s AP Curriculum and Content Development Director, is in overall charge of the AP U.S. History redesign process. Presumably, Sinke and Dickson answer to him. So it is of interest that Charap wrote the companion piece in America on the World Stage to the scholarly article on American cultural imperialism. This scholarly treatment of American cultural imperialism, penned by left-leaning University of Michigan historian Penny Von Eschen, is relentlessly critical of America’s economic and military presence in the world. Eschen, for example, touts the Marxist tract, How to Read Donald Duck, by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelhart, as the classic treatment of American cultural imperialism. How to Read Donald Duck explores the subtle and sinister ways in which Disney cartoons advocate “adherence to the U.S. economic system and capitalist values and work ethic,” as if this was a very bad thing.

Charap’s essay highlights America’s commercial advertisements and anti-Soviet propaganda efforts in the Middle East during the Cold War. Charap seeks out off-putting examples of American propaganda and then suggests that students to put themselves in the places of people in the Soviet block or developing world as they respond to the American presence. This, indeed, is teaching students to see their country through the eyes of its alleged “victims” and enemies.

So the three people most immediately responsible for the writing of the new AP U.S. History Framework were intimately involved in the College Board’s effort to transform the teaching of American history along the lines of Bender’s La Pietra Report. What’s more, the AP U.S. History redesign process began in August of 2006, just about the time America on the World Stage was taking shape. Dickson, a co-editor of that book, was on the original redesign committee as well as the later one that actually wrote the new AP U.S. History Framework. Dickson himself notes that his work with the OAH (which largely focused on advancing the goals of the La Pietra Report) was a key factor in the College Board’s decision to appoint him to the AP U.S. History Redesign Commission. How can American conservatives, moderates, and even traditional liberals trust an AP U.S. History redesign effort led by figures who were so deeply enmeshed in a leftist attempt to reshape the American history curriculum?

A detailed analysis of the new AP U.S. History Framework is for another time. Suffice it to say that in its downplaying of America’s traditional national story and emphasis instead on material causation and exploitation within the context of a transnational Atlantic World, the new AP U.S. History Framework is a huge step in the direction of precisely the sort of de-nationalized American history advocated by Thomas Bender and the La Pietra Report.

It is also important to emphasize that the concept of American exceptionalism, which is systematically excised from, and contradicted by, the redesigned Framework, is an integral part of several state curriculum guides, including the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS). That raises serious legal questions about the compatibility of the redesigned Framework with state standards.

This is not to say that Bender, the La Pietra Report, and the attack on American exceptionalism are the only important ideological influences on the redesigned AP U.S. History Framework. Several other important streams of political and intellectual influence have shaped the new Framework, and I will be detailing these in future reports.

It is true, of course, that as on much else, Americans are divided about how best to teach and understand U.S. history. This is precisely why the new, lengthy, and detailed AP U.S. History Framework is such a bad idea. The brief five-page conceptual guideline the Framework replaced allowed sufficient flexibility for teachers to approach U.S. History from a wide variety of perspectives. Liberals, conservatives, and anyone in-between could teach U.S. history their way, and still see their students do well on the AP Test. The College Board’s new and vastly more detailed guidelines can only be interpreted as an attempt to hijack the teaching of U.S. history on behalf of a leftist political and ideological perspective. The College Board has drastically eroded the freedom of states, school districts, teachers, and parents to choose the history they teach their children. That is why this change must not stand.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/386202/how-college-board-politicized-us-history-stanley-kurtz

Obama Symphony of Destruction, Why worry about ‘no boots’ when Obama’s heart isn’t in the battle against radical Islam?

Aside from the Arabs, who would back him 100 percent, Western leaders signing up for the ragtag coalition to take on ISIS, should be asked by their masses why they would send soldiers into a battle led by a pretend general who plays AWOL at 60 percent of his intelligence session?

Barack Obama has blundered into the mideast war with no intel in his strategy arsenal.

He’s skipped through (read golfed, vacationed and partied his way through) daily intelligence briefings for almost 60 percent of the more than two thousand trying days of his presidency through September 29, 2014.

“A new Government Accountability Institute (GAI) report reveals that President Barack Obama has attended only 42.1% of his daily intelligence briefings (known officially as the Presidential Daily Brief, (or PDB) in the 2,079 days of his presidency through September 29, 2014.” (Breitbart, Sept. 30, 2014).

With Obama MIA in almost 60 percent of his PDB, where is he getting his information???

Mainstream media, armchair critics and bloggers can posit their opinions on where Obama gets his intelligence on unfolding events in the Mideast, but western leaders with real soldiers at risk in a war zone, don’t have the same luxury.

The GAI report also included a breakdown of Obama’s PDB attendance record between terms; he attended 42.4% of his PDBs in his first term and 41.3% in his second. (Breitbart)
“The GAI’s alarming findings come on the heels of Obama’s 60 Minutes comments on Sunday, wherein the president laid the blame for the Islamic State’s (ISIS) rapid rise squarely at the feet of his Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

“I think our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that I think they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria,” said Obama.
“According to Daily Beast reporter Eli Lake, members of the Defense establishment were “flabbergasted” by Obama’s attempt to shift blame.

“Either the president doesn’t read the intelligence he’s getting or he’s bullshitting,” a former senior Pentagon official “who worked closely on the threat posed by Sunni jihadists in Syria and Iraq” told the Daily Beast.

“On Monday, others in the intelligence community similarly blasted Obama and said he’s shown longstanding disinterest in receiving live, in-person PDBs that allow the Commander-in-Chief the chance for critical followup, feedback, questions, and the challenging of flawed intelligence assumptions.

“It’s pretty well-known that the president hasn’t taken in-person intelligence briefings with any regularity since the early days of 2009,” an Obama national security staffer told the Daily Mail on Monday. “He gets them in writing.”“

Infamous for his absenteeism as a barely there senator from Illinois, his absentee style followed him to the Oval Office, begging the question, “What is Obama being paid for?”

The Western leaders who jumped so readily into ‘The Coalition of the Phantom Airstrikes’ should not buy into Obama’s political terminology that airstrikes with no boots on the ground is not a war when ISIS is killing off thousands in a visible war that seeks to install a Caliphate on all world citizens.

Leaders of Western civilization: Boots on the ground are not the only thing missing in Iraq and Syria because Obama’s heart so obviously isn’t in it.

Shouldn’t someone be stepping up to the plate to ask: “WHY IS THAT?

Suspicions flew as thick in the air as mosquitoes in a swamp weeks before Obama was caught in the glare of the headlights for ducking his intel briefings.

Has it dawned on any Western leader that Obama and the Arabs is a stranger than strange combo? Or like British Prime Minister David Cameron, are they all drinking from the same Obama water hole?

Did they all swallow the proverbial hook, line and sinker fallacy that Iran had America’s back covered?

There’s a pungent fishy stench coming from the Obama-led airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, and the fish we used to know long died out in the oceans and fresh water lakes of the world.

Are any of the western leaders who signed up for the airstrikes even aware that they are now in league with a president who is openly against his own country?

Do they remember that with no qualifications other than those of a garden variety community organizer, BHO was presented from faux Greek columns at his party’s national convention as a Hollywood-type Messiah?

Commonsense should dictate that Obama is about as much a Messiah as radical Islam is a religion of peace.

It is patently obvious after six long years that Barack Obama is a legend in his own mind; and critically important today that western leaders refuse to let him be one in theirs.

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/66380?utm_source=CFP+Mailout&utm_campaign=55d9668e9c-Call_to_Champions&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_d8f503f036-55d9668e9c-297703129

Un-Common, Not Core.

I became a math teacher by a circuitous route.  My degree is in engineering.  I spent five and a half years refurbishing nuclear submarines, and then I quit work to bear, rear, and eventually homeschool our three children.

As a homeschool mom, I participated in co-ops, taking turns teaching groups of homeschooled children subjects such as nature study and geography. As our children entered their teen years, I began teach to teach algebra, trig, and calculus to small classes of homeschoolers at my kitchen table.  And as our children left home for their four-year universities, two to major in engineering and one in art, I began teaching in small private schools known as classical academies.

This last year, I have also been tutoring public-school students in Common Core math, and this summer I taught a full year of Common Core Algebra 2 compressed into six weeks at an expensive, ambitious private school. 

I've taught and tutored the gamut of textbooks and curricula: Miquon and Saxon to my own kids and whenever the choice of curriculum was mine to make; Foerster, Saxon, Jacobs, or Holt when hired to teach at a school.  I've tutored out of the California state adopted texts: CPM, Everyday Math, Mathland, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw Hill, Addison Wesley, and Holt.  I've had students come to me from all of the above plus Teaching Textbooks, Singapore, and Math U See.

This last year was my first experience first tutoring, then teaching Common Core, and I was curious.  I had read the reports of elementary-school children crying over their homework and staying up past midnight to complete it, so I expected Common Core to be like Everyday Math, Mathland, and CPM: poorly explained, abstruse, confusing.  I was correct on those counts.

What surprised me was that Common Core was also hard.

Now, I like rigor.  I have high standards.  My goal for my students is that they will become competent and confident mathematicians.  But I was stunned to see that my tutoring student's pre-algebra work incorporated about a third of a year of algebra 1.  The algebra 2 text incorporated about a third of the topics I would expect to find in a precalculus course.  And so forth.

This did not mesh with the reports from Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Utah, or New York, where Common Core is alleged to lower standards – in one case, specifically, to move multiplication tables from third grade to fifth grade.  It appears that Common Core is not being implemented in a consistent (or common) way across the United States.  But I can only address pre-algebra through calculus in texts claiming to be Common Core in California.  These texts are shoveling about a third of the subsequent year's topics into the current year.

This problem is exacerbated by the recent fad for accelerating students through their math classes.  Fifty years ago, algebra 1 was a ninth-grade course for fourteen-year-olds.  Now it is routinely taught in eighth grade, sometimes in seventh.  Algebra 1 in seventh grade means that pre-algebra is taught in sixth grade to eleven-year-olds, and few eleven-year-olds have achieved the cognitive development necessary to master the abstract logic of one third of a year of algebra.

Cognitive development proceeds not in a smooth curve, but in jumps and plateaus.  Just as most babies learn to walk at twelve months, so most adolescents become capable of logical operations such as algebra at twelve years.  And just as whether a baby walks at nine months or fifteen months has no bearing on whether he plays football in college, so whether a student learns algebra in 7th or 9thgrade has no bearing on whether she becomes a National Merit Scholar...save that a child who is pushed and flounders and fails is unlikely to love an activity.

That is what I am seeing with my tutoring students: the math-bright ones are being encouraged to take honors pre-algebra at age eleven.  In prior years, this would have meant that they first had a thorough, final review of arithmetic: adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing whole numbers, decimals, and fractions; long division; changing fractions to decimals to percents and back.  Then for a treat, they would be introduced to the glories of algebra, the fun stuff: Rene Descartes' brilliant invention, with plenty of lists of points that, if properly executed, form an outline of a fish or a dinosaur. 

 They would be taught signed numbers, order of operations, distributive property, and how to solve for x, and that would be about it.  They would finish the year happily aware that math is fun and that they are good at it.  If they were fortunate enough to be taught from Jacobs's Mathematics: a Human Endeavor, they would learn about sequences and mosaics and logarithms and even networks, but all with a very concrete development, suited to the emergent logical thinker.

The reform mathematicians who put together Common Core are ignoring cognitive development.  My Common Core pre-algebra students are hurried through the arithmetic review and taught the coordinate system.  They graph lines and parabolas.  They do transformations, exponents (including zero and negative exponents), and a truly horrendous percentage of percentage problems.  The homework can be finished in an hour if the student's parents can afford to hire a BS mechanical engineer to sit at his elbow and remind him when he takes a wrong turn.  Otherwise, he is up 'til midnight.  Students work hard at tasks beyond their strength; they flounder; they fail; they learn that math is no fun.

This isn't education. This is child abuse.

Another aspect of Common Core that surprised me was the emphasis given to parent functions and transformations. People over forty years of age, even techies such as physicists, chemists, engineers, and mathematicians, won't know what parent functions are.  People under thirty-five who have been educated in reform mathematics textbooks will be surprised that is possible to learn mathematics without learning about transformations.

Fifty years ago, transformations were not taught, although math-bright students would figure them out for themselves in analytic geometry (second-semester pre-calculus).  Today, they are taught systematically beginning in elementary school.

The treatment of transformations reminds me of the New Math debacle of the 1960s.  The reform mathematicians of the day decided that they were going to improve mathematical education by teaching all students what the math-bright children figured out for themselves.

In exactly the same way, the current crop of reform math educators has decided that transformations are an essential underlying principle, and are teaching them: laboriously, painfully, and unnecessarily.  They are tormenting and confusing the average student, and depriving the math-bright student of the delight of discovering underlying principles for herself.

One aspect of Common Core that did not surprise me was a heavy reliance on calculators.

The main problem I see with my algebra students is that they have poor number sense.  They can't tell whether the answer their calculator shows is reasonable or not.  They cling to the notion that 1.41 is somehow more precise than square root of two.  They also can't add fractions or do long division, which puts them at a severe disadvantage when they must add rational expressions or divide polynomials.

Common Core exacerbates this problem.  At every level, the problems are designed to be too hard to solve by hand.  A calculator is necessary even in elementary school – unless a child is to spend 5 hours a night on homework.  A graphing calculator is necessary for algebra – calculating correlation coefficients by hand is not a viable option.  My students are whizzes with their calculators.  But they reach for them to square 1/3...then write it as 0.11.

Common Core advocates claim that they are avoiding that boring, rote drill in favor of higher-order thinking skills.  Nowhere is this more demonstrably false than in their treatment of formulas.  An old-style text would have the student memorize a few formulas and be able to derive the rest.  Common Core loads the student down with more formulas than can possibly be memorized.  There is no instruction on derivation; the formulas are handed down as though an archangel brought them down from heaven.  Since it is impossible to memorize all the various formulas, students are permitted – nay, encouraged – to develop cheat sheets to use on the tests.

The second-biggest problem with Common Core is the problem of Big Mistakes.  Pretend for a moment that a homeschool family did something as asinine as giving their eight-year-old a calculator instead of teaching him his times tables.  That child would be a calculator cripple.

But that would be a small mistake, affecting one child.  Now consider what happens when a state made such a mistake.  We don't even have to pretend.  In 1986, California adopted Whole Language Arts, which proved to be a disaster.  Within a decade, California plunged to 49th out of 50 in reading performance.  Millions of children were affected.  Big mistake.

If different states have different curricula, we can observe what works and what does not, and improve thereby.  But Common Core is being pushed nationwide.  This could be the Biggest of all possible Mistakes.

But the worst problem with Common Core is its likely effect on the educational gap between rich and poor in this country.  The students I tutor have parents who would describe themselves as "comfortable."  No one likes to admit to being rich.  But the middle class and poor cannot afford to pay a tutoring company $50 to $100 per hour so that someone will sit with their children and explain trig identities.

The oft-repeated goal of Common Core is that every child will be "college or career ready."  Couple that slogan with the oft-expressed admiration for the European system of education – in European countries, students are slotted for university or a dead-end job at age fourteen, based ostensibly on their performance on high-stakes tests, but that performance almost inevitably matches the student's socioeconomic class.  Do we really want to destroy upward mobility and implement a rigid class structure in the United States of America?

To recapitulate: Common Core teaches about a third of algebra 1 in pre-algebra, a third of pre-calculus in algebra 2, et cetera.  Common Core teaches unnecessary abstractions as essential principles.  Common Core creates calculator cripples.  Common Core fails to derive mathematical expressions, instead presenting them as Holy Writ.

I predict that if we continue implementing Common Core, average students will drop out of math as early as they are allowed.  Even math-bright students will hate math.  Tutoring companies will proliferate to serve wealthy families.  The educational gap between rich and poor will widen.  If we want to destroy math and science education in this country, keep Common Core.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/09/uncommon_not_core.html#ixzz3EeLQJsS7
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L.M.A.O Obama's most ardent supporters are going to be furious with this comparison to George W. Bush

Eric Fast and Furious Holder Out, Special Prosecutor to Follow?

 Eric Holder is resigning at long last. Good riddance.

(If President Obama wants to stay the course, I would suggest Al Sharpton as a replacement.  Nobody can frustrate legal process like Big Al.  Sharpton effortlessly dodges lawsuits and tax collectors. He’s got the kind of legal experience that makes him a perfect fit at the Justice Department.)

Holder is the legal ringleader for today’s Democrats and their noxious culture of corruption. After being held in criminal contempt of Congress in June 2012 -- the first such citation against a sitting attorney general in American history -- for a while he has been just a few steps away from being impeached in the House of Representatives. Now it appears he will never be tried in the Senate for the high crimes and misdemeanors he has committed against the American people.

If there is any justice, after the Obama era mercifully draws to a close, Holder will be prosecuted for a litany of abuses that have been ably documented by J. Christian Adams in Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department and by John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky in Obama’s Enforcer: Eric Holder’s Justice Department.

But don’t hold your breath waiting for justice to be done.

Like President Barack Hussein Obama, Holder knows he is immune from criticism because he is black. Holder possesses an ugly combination of creepy self-righteousness, cockiness, hatred of country, and racist contempt for white Americans that make him the darling of the activist Left and the mainstream media which refuses to report on his many, many misdeeds.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/09/eric_holder_out_special_prosecutor_to_follow.html#ixzz3ELotxbLl
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Common Core isn’t our only problem–Consider the College Board

Who wrote the Declaration of Independence? The Second Continental Congress assigned that responsibility to a committee that included Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston. After discussing the general outline the document should follow, the committee decided Jefferson would be the best person to write the document. So Jefferson receives the honor of being the author of America’s Declaration of Independence. The Second Continental Congress could have listed Franklin, Adams, Sherman, and Livingston under the heading, “Acknowledgements.”

Now here’s a second question. Who actually wrote the College Board’s Advanced Placement (AP) U.S. History Framework? Since this Framework will govern how American history is taught to about 500,000 students in more than 8,000 high schools every year, we asked College Board to reveal its authors. This is the biased, poorly written, and ineptly organized document that has raised alarms from state and national leaders.  After repeated requests, the College Board finally responded by posting this statement on its AP Central website: “The professors and teachers [are] listed by name and institution on page v of the AP US History Framework.”

When you turn to page v, you will find the names of 19 different college professors and teachers who served on two College Board Committees. Significantly, the College Board does not identify these people as “authors.” Instead, they are simply listed under, “Acknowledgements.”

Attending workshops, exchanging emails, and posting comments on the College Board’s electronic discussion boards are not the same thing as being credited as an author. According to the Journal of American History, the title of author is reserved for people who actually write a document.

So once again, who actually wrote the College Board Framework? We still don’t know, but we now know whodidn’t write it: the 19 people listed under the title “Acknowledgements”! We know this because Dr. Fred Anderson, one of those 19 educators, admitted in a letter to the Colorado State Board of Education that “[n]either I nor Christine Heyrman (the other early Americanist on the Commission) had any hand in drafting this Part, so I can only guess at why the examples that appear were chosen.” The “Part” Anderson refers to includes the actual course content on pages 28 to 77.

So if Anderson doesn’t know who chose to include the Black Panthers and exclude Martin Luther King Jr, then who did make this choice? In The Daily Caller, Blake Neff writes, “The Board’s refusal has fueled speculation that the standards may have been authored by very left-wing college professors, or possibly by ordinary grad students working as freelancers rather than by full professors.” What is the College Board hiding?

The identity of the Framework’s authors is not a trivial matter that can be left unexamined. It would be irresponsible and contrary to academic integrity for an elected state or local board of education to adopt a controversial curriculum written by anonymous authors. America’s high school students deserve far better instruction in their nation’s history.

http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/2014/08/15/why-wont-college-board-reveal-its-ap-us-history-authors

Liberty Beats "Common Core, Uncommon Conformity"

Published on Sep 18, 2014

Liberty Beats Episode 3: "Common Core, Uncommon Conformity"
Freesong of the Political Observer.
Written, performed, produced and edited by Sam Martin.