Jeb Bush Urges States to Embrace Common Core Standards Despite Criticism

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The "avalanche" of criticism is not without justification, Jeb. C'mon, listen to the PEOPLE.

Jeb Bush Urges States to Embrace Common Core Standards Despite Criticism

Posted by Joe For America on Mar 21, 2014 in Breaking Stories, Education, Email

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NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush on Wednesday urged state officials to follow through on Common Core education standards despite what he called an “avalanche” of criticism from those who oppose them.
Bush said at an education forum with Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam and U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., that the standards are key to improving educational achievement around the country.
“This is a real-world, grown-up approach to a real crisis that we have,” said Bush, who later brushed off reporters’ questions about his presidential aspirations. “And it’s been mired in politics.
“Trust me I know,” he said. “There are not a whole lot of people who are standing up to this avalanche.”
Bush ascribed the opposition to Common Core to what he called “myths” about the standards being part of a federal takeover of local classrooms.
Common Core standards spell out what math and reading skills students should have in each grade. They are designed to make students think and reason more than they do with traditional classroom work.
Tennessee is among the vast majority of states that have adopted the standards developed by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers with help from teachers, parents and experts.
But Tennessee is also among the states grappling with a backlash against Common Core, especially by conservative groups.
Haslam on Tuesday embarked on a hastily arranged statewide tour to try to drum up support for Common Core amid moves by state lawmakers seeking to delay the standards and related testing by two years.
Alexander, a former two-term governor and U.S. education secretary, is running for a third term in the Senate this year. He has voiced support for education initiatives originating with the states, but has introduced legislation seeking to keep federal waiver decisions from being based on participation in programs like Common Core.


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Posted at 11:37 AM ET, 08/21/2012 Aug 21, 2012 03:37 PM EDT
TheWashingtonPost

Eight problems with Common Core Standards

By Valerie Strauss

Correction: The original post said incorrectly that the Common Core was written with no public dialogue or feedback from experienced educators. The post now says there was insufficient public dialogue and feedback from experienced educators.

This was written by Marion Brady, veteran teacher, administrator, curriculum designer and author.
By Marion Brady
E.D. Hirsch, Jr.’s book, “Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know,” was published March 1, 1987.

So it was probably in March of that year when, sitting at a dining room table in an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, my host — a
Third grade teachers learn how to teach common core mathematics in Tennessee.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/rf/ima...EeGCnY7t2eOslg (Mark A Large/AP) publishing executive, friend, and fellow West Virginian — said he’d just bought the book. He hadn’t read it yet, but wondered how Hirsch’s list of 5,000 things he thought every American should know differed from a list we Appalachians might write.
I don’t remember what I said, but it was probably some version of what I’ve long taken for granted: Most people think that whatever they and the people they like happen to know, everybody else should be required to know.
In education, of course, what it’s assumed that everybody should be required to know is called “the core.” Responsibility for teaching the core is divvied up between teachers of math, science, language arts, and social studies.
Variously motivated corporate interests, arguing that the core was being sloppily taught, organized a behind-the-scenes campaign to super-standardize it. They named their handiwork the Common Core State Standards to hide the fact that it was driven by policymakers in Washington D.C., who have thus far shoved it into every state except Alaska, Minnesota, Nebraska, Texas, and Virginia.
This was done with insufficient public dialogue or feedback from experienced educators, no research, no pilot or experimental programs — no evidence at all that a floor-length list created by unnamed people attempting to standardize what’s taught is a good idea.
It’s a bad idea. Ignore the fact that specific Common Core State Standards will open up enough cans of worms to keep subject-matter specialists arguing among themselves forever. Consider instead the merit of Standards from a general perspective:
One: Standards shouldn’t be attached to school subjects, but to the qualities of mind it’s hoped the study of school subjects promotes. Subjects are mere tools, just as scalpels, acetylene torches, and transits are tools. Surgeons, welders, surveyors — and teachers — should be held accountable for the quality of what they produce, not how they produce it.
Two: The world changes. The future is indiscernible. Clinging to a static strategy in a dynamic world may be comfortable, even comforting, but it’s a Titanic-deck-chair exercise.
Three: The Common Core Standards assume that what kids need to know is covered by one or another of the traditional core subjects. In fact, the unexplored intellectual terrain lying between and beyond those familiar fields of study is vast, expands by the hour, and will go in directions no one can predict.
Four: So much orchestrated attention is being showered on the Common Core Standards, the main reason for poor student performance is being ignored—a level of childhood poverty the consequences of which no amount of schooling can effectively counter.
Five: The Common Core kills innovation. When it’s the only game in town, it’s the only game in town.
Six: The Common Core Standards are a set-up for national standardized tests, tests that can’t evaluate complex thought, can’t avoid cultural bias, can’t measure non-verbal learning, can’t predict anything of consequence (and waste boatloads of money).
Seven: The word “standards” gets an approving nod from the public (and from most educators) because it means “performance that meets a standard.” However, the word also means “like everybody else,” and standardizing minds is what the Standards try to do. Common Core Standards fans sell the first meaning; the Standards deliver the second meaning. Standardized minds are about as far out of sync with deep-seated American values as it’s possible to get.
Eight: The Common Core Standards’ stated aim — “success in college and careers”— is at best pedestrian, at worst an affront. The young should be exploring the potentials of humanness.
I’ve more beefs, but like these eight, they have to do with the quality of education, and the pursuit of educational quality isn’t what’s driving the present education reform farce.
An illustration: As I write, my wife is in the kitchen. She calls me for lunch. The small television suspended under the kitchen cabinets is tuned to CNN, and Time cover girl Michelle Rhee is being interviewed.
“On international tests,” she says, “the U.S. ranks 27th from the top.”
Michelle Rhee, three-year teacher, education reactionary, mainstream media star, fired authoritarian head of a school system being investigated for cheating on standardized tests, is given a national platform to misinform. She doesn’t explain that, at the insistence of policymakers, and unlike other countries, America tests every kid — the mentally disabled, the sick, the hungry, the homeless, the transient, the troubled, those for whom English is a second language. That done, the scores are lumped together. She doesn’t even hint that when the scores of the disadvantaged aren’t counted, American students are at the top.
If Michelle Rhee doesn’t know that, she shouldn’t be on CNN. If she knows it but fails to point it out, she shouldn’t be on CNN.
It’s hard not to compare Rhee with Jennifer, a friend of my oldest son. He wrote me recently:
…I asked Jenn if she was ready for school.
“I’m waiting for an email from my principal to find out if I can get into my classroom a week early.”
“Why a whole week?”
“To get my room ready.”
She teaches second graders. I ask her why she loves that grade. She laughs and says, “Because they haven’t learned to roll their eyes yet.”
But I know it’s much more than that. Her sister was down from Ohio for Jenn’s birthday, and when she asked her what she wanted, Jenn said she needed 18 sets of colored pencils, 18 boxes of #2 pencils, 18 boxes of crayons, construction paper, name tags and so on — $346 dollars total.
She’s been doing this for 25 years. I’m sure she makes less than I do, but they could probably cut her salary 25 or 30% and she’d still want to get into her room early.”

Rhee gets $50,000 a pop plus first-class travel and accommodations for putting in an appearance to tell her audiences what’s wrong with the Jennifers in America’s schools, and what clubs should be swung or held over their heads to scare them into shaping up.
Future historians (if there are any) are going to shake their heads in disbelief. They’ll wonder how, in a single generation, the world’s oldest democracy dismantled its engine — free, public, locally controlled, democratic education.
If they dig into the secretive process that produced the Common Core State Standards, most of their questions will be answered
-0-
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Is this Common Core math question the worst math question in human history?

Eric Owens 10:00 AM 12/07/2013

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Eric Owens
Education Editor

http://cdn01.dailycaller.com/wp-cont...tty-Images.jpg confused student. Photo: Getty Images

Video at the Page Link

U.S. Educationhttp://images.intellitxt.com/ast/adTypes/icon1.png Secretary Arne Duncan has promised to improve education quality vastly by pushing for the implementation of the Common Core State Standards Initiative.
This year, 45 states and the District of Columbia have implemented the Common Core standards and curricula based on those standards.
Duncan doesn’t much care for the people who criticize Common Core, either. He has insisted that it’s all a bunch of “white suburban momshttp://images.intellitxt.com/ast/adTypes/icon1.png who — all of a sudden — their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were, and that’s pretty scary.” (RELATED: Arne Duncan blames irrational angst of ‘white suburban moms’ for Common Core pushback)
What, exactly, is the content of this Common Core that’s going to make American kids so much smarterhttp://images.intellitxt.com/ast/adTypes/icon1.png? So far it appears to be a slew of worksheets and tests involving various, incomprehensible arrays of squares and circles. (RELATED: EPIC FAIL: Parents reveal insane Common Core worksheets)

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https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images...e13_bigger.png Kevin @kevinpost
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@michellemalkin a great common core question a friend, who is a teacher, posted. Cc @TwitchyTeam
9:24 AM - 6 Dec 2013

There are also traditional word problems. Twitchy has found a word problem that may be the most egregiously awful math problem the Common Core has produced yet. Take a look:

According to the Twitter user who posted it, the vexing problem came from a friend who is a teacherhttp://images.intellitxt.com/ast/adTypes/icon1.png.
The problem comes from a Houghton Mifflin Assessment Guidehttp://images.intellitxt.com/ast/adTypes/icon1.png. It appears among a larger set of basically similar math problems here. The problem involving Juanita appears on page AG102, nestled among some other problems that are similarly weak and crappy — though not nearly as harrrowing as the problem above.

http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com...46497519631641

Link: http://www.googleadservices.com/page...nm=8&mb=2&bg=0


Houghton Mifflin is Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, a huge textbook publisher. The company’s website promises to be “a partner who will share the responsibilities” of the Common Core: “We have created a wide range of content, curricula, and services to support school leaders, teachers and educators, parentshttp://images.intellitxt.com/ast/adTypes/icon1.png, and especially students with this transition.”
Twitchy readers tried to tease out the answer to the Juanita problem — how can you not? – and determined that the answer is either 12, 24, 0 or 7.

Follow Eric on Twitter and on Facebook, and send education-related story tips to erico@dailycaller.com.
Tags: Arne Duncan, Common Core


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Michelle Malkin flattens Jeb Bush’s assertion Common Core is ‘truth serum’

March 22, 2014 by Richard Berkow 21 Comments

Speaking before 900 people at the annual Broward County Workshop breakfast Friday, former Governor Jeb Bush decried the controversy surrounding Common Core.
“Let me tell you something,” he said. “In Asia today, they don’t care about children’s esteem. They care about math, whether they can read in English, whether they understand why science is important, whether they have the grit and determination to be successful,” the Sun-Sentinel reported.
He added that the standards are “benchmarked to the rest of the world…a truth serum for our communities to wake up and realize that we’ve languished far too long,” also berating the critics “who go nuts about it.”

‘Egadsten!’ Pelosi’s daughter does the
unthinkable to Gadsden ‘don’t tread on me’ flag

What he did not mention, of course, was the integral role his brother Neil has in the financial success of the project, or the prominent role K Street lobbyists, Bill Gates, George Soros, high-placed Democratic strategists, and other left-wing plutocrats have played in promoting this one-size-fits-all brainwashing agenda, according to Dr. Alison Rampersad, Co-Chair of Eyes on U.S. Education.
Columnist Michelle Malkin immediately took issue with Bush’s remarks.
“Jeb Bush’s ‘Foundation for Excellence in Education’ is also saturating the airwaves with ads trying to salvage Common Core in the face of truly bipartisan, truly grassroots opposition in his home state Florida,” Malkin wrote in a recent op-ed, Get to Know the Common Core Marketing Overlords.
“[His] foundation is tied at the hip to the federally funded testing consortium called PARCC, which pulled in $186 million through the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program to develop Common Core tests.”
She listed the business groups, trade associations, partisan foundations, Democratic influence-peddlers, Clinton-era educrats, and publishing corporations who also stand to profit from implementing Common Core.
“Just follow the money,” Malkin wrote. “This bipartisan power grab is Washington-led and Washington-fed.”
Bush concluded his speech to the audience by asking, “You tell me which society is going to be the winner in this 21^st Century: The one that worries about how they feel, or the one that worries about making sure the next generation has the capacity to eat everybody’s lunch?”
Bush’s categorical defense of Common Core triggered this response from Malkin on Twitter:


https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images...966_bigger.png Michelle Malkin ✔ @michellemalkin Follow

Jeb Bush says Common Core is a "truth serum." More like a toxin.

https://twitter.com/MarcACaputo/status/446997721640353792 … #stopcommoncore
10:17 AM - 21 Mar 2014

https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images...966_bigger.png Michelle Malkin ✔ @michellemalkin Follow

When it comes to Common Core peddlers like @JebBush et al: Don't read their lips. Follow the money==> http://michellemalkin.com/2014/03/21/get-to-know-the-common-core-marketing-overlords/ … #stopcommoncore

10:31 AM - 21 Mar 2014


http://www.bizpacreview.com/2014/03/...h-serum-107895

couldn't say it any better.... follow the money

The Suicidal Machinations of the GOP

Posted on March 24, 2014 by J. Matt Barber

Leave it to the Republican Party to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

While nearly every poll definitively affirms that Democrats are in deep doo-doo come November, and as leftist talking heads like Chris Matthews have already conceded a likelihood that Republicans will take the Senate in the 2014 mid-term elections, many of the GOP’s highest profile personalities obtusely refuse to take yes for an answer. They’re evidently hell-bent on disenfranchising the party’s pejoratively tagged “social issues” majority.

Stupid, stupid and stupid.

From mealy mouthed moderate establishment-types like Chris Christie, to dovish libertine libertarians like Rand Paul, it seems a majority of the GOP rock stars are scared gutless to set a single yellow-nailed pinky toe on the fevered culture war battlefield. They say it’s time to raise the white flag on traditional values.

Guys, I’m here to tell you, the “social issues” aren’t going away. But keep up this fatalistic nonsense and the GOP’s Christian-conservative base just might. Morality-minded Americans are sick of it, and we will choose fidelity to principle over surrender to ill-perceived “pragmatism” every time.

Take presidential wannabe Rand Paul. This guy, who, by all appearances, was shaping up to be a thoroughbred in the 2016 primary horserace, may have just snapped a leg before the gates have even chimed open.

In a recent interview with the uber-liberal online rag, Vocative.com, Paul could hardly wait to take a matchstick to the official Republican Party “social issues” platform (i.e., the sanctity of marriage, natural human sexuality and morality, ending the abortion holocaust, religious liberty, the Second Amendment and the like.)

Said Paul:
“I think that the Republican Party, in order to get bigger, will have to agree to disagree on social issues. The Republican Party is not going to give up on having quite a few people who do believe in traditional marriage. But the Republican Party also has to find a place for young people and others who don’t want to be festooned by those issues.”

In other words, the Republican Party must become a wussified version of the Democratic Party.
Democrat-lite.

Rand, Rand, Rand. This is the same failed, tired, reach-out-to-the-needy-independents strategy that brought us Presidents Dole, McCain, and Romney. What is it about the GOP that has it constantly biting the hand that feeds it, while begging for a little scratch-behind-the-ear action from the fickle fingers of “independent” indifference?

There’s an interesting aside to Paul’s Vocative.com interview. My friend and nationally syndicated talk radio host Steve Deace made an interesting point in a recent email.

Wrote Deace:

“By the way, the website that Rand Paul did the interview with when he talked about needing to agree to disagree on social issues has stories titled ‘Shame Free Guide to Hookups’ and ‘Five Questions for the Creator of Direct Your Own Porn.’

“Can you imagine if Obama, or any national Democrat figure for that matter, gave an interview on public policy to a website that produces such content? Every conservative group in the country would be decrying how this is more evidence of America’s moral decline,” said Deace.
It’s also evidence, frankly, of the GOP’s moral decline and loss of its historical moorings, courage and resolve to stand firm on the transcendent, non-negotiable issues of life, liberty and the natural family, marriage and human sexuality.

If the big ol’ dumb elephant continues on this ill-fated trajectory, I can guarantee that the Christian-conservative base will abandon it, as it has abandoned us. Although we’d rather take the Ronald Reagan approach and reform the party from within, I can promise you that we will, if that becomes a lost cause, form a new, principled, conservative “values voters” third party.

If that happens, Democrats will rule the roost indefinitely.

Now that is scary.

In his email, Deace offered some wise counsel to Rand Paul and others who are squeamish on the “social issues.”

“Here’s what a libertarian like Rand Paul could say,” he advised. “Until somebody can prove their definition of ‘rights’ doesn’t cost somebody they’re already God-ordained rights, the burden of proof remains. And right now we’re seeing these new ‘rights’ costing people their free speech and religious freedom rights that were established at the founding of this republic. And that’s something Americans of all persuasions on the marriage issue should be opposed to.”

As I’ve noted before, Ronald Reagan often spoke of a “three-legged stool” that undergirds what I call “complete conservatism.” The legs symbolize a strong national defense, strong free-market principles and strong traditional social values. For the stool to remain upright, it must be supported by all three legs. If you snap off even one leg, the stool collapses under its own weight.

Why the GOP establishment seems determined to snap off the traditional social values leg, thus collapsing the entire Republican Party stool, defies all explanation.

Back in January I praised Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus for making several public pronouncements in defense of the “social issues”-conservative Republican Party platform in general and the unalienable rights to both life and religious liberty in particular.

Reince, you may want to have a sit-down with your party leadership and tell them to get their head in the game. If they don’t, we, the GOP base, may just decide to take our ball and go home.

Understand this: We “social issues” conservatives (read: complete conservatives) will never stop playing the game. But if the Republican Party doesn’t quit moving the goalposts, we may just have to go stake out a new playing field.

Read more at http://godfatherpolitics.com/14881/s...46Z8siuhed7.99