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When Barack Obama said he wanted to "fundamentally transform the United States", few realized how comprehensively he meant to do exactly that. Most people were focused on the economy and how Obama wants to tax the rich and expand the handouts to increase dependency on government. However, one of the most fundamental of his projected transformations is his federal takeover of public school curricula. It's well known that public schools are not graduating students as well-educated as formerly, that Americans score poorly on international tests, and that billions of federal dollars showered on public schools have not achieved any of the designated goals, which were to raise test scores and to eliminate the gap between higher income and lower income students. The Obama progressives want us to believe the remedy is to turn over control to the federal government. So the Obama Administration has latched onto a national education curriculum called CommonCore that was launched by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. Those organizations have very official names but they are actually private groups financed by foundations such as Gates and other corporations. Their plan is to induce all elementary and secondary schools to accept a comprehensive national curriculum. National standards will be locked in by the tests students must take called assessments, which in turn are tied to teacher evaluation. The standards instruct the teachers what to teach so their pupils can pass the tests and teachers can get positive evaluations. This process bypasses parents and state and local school boards, and will fundamentally transform education by dictating what every child will learn. This will be achieved by carrot-and-stick methodology. The carrot is the offer of federal money, such as Race to the Top money granted only if the states first adopt the CommonCore standards. The stick is the threat to withhold federal funds from states that don't obey. What some opponents are now calling "Obama Core" ought to be held unconstitutional because the federal government has no power over education under the Constitution, and federal law specifically prohibits the federal government from having any sayso over curriculum or tests. The essence of Obama Core is control of curriculum because that is where minds are molded and stimulated to higher levels of learning, and character is formed. Many parents will recognize the Math standards as what is called Fuzzy Math, i.e., teaching very little arithmetic while wasting class time in having kids describe how they got their answers instead of teaching them the best way to get correct answers. The English and Literature standards are worse because they omit traditional and classical literature and confine kids to boring informational readings such as instruction manuals. The so-called standards are set low enough for most students to pass the tests. Education commentators say that the graduation standards do not prepare students for college work, and some admit that the goal is only to move kids to twoyear community colleges. Obama Core is a comprehensive plan to dumb down schoolchildren so they will accept the leftwing view of America and its history. |
