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| |  | | | Common Core | National Review Online | The Common Core State Standards Initiative is widely denounced for imposing confusing, unhelpful experimental teaching methods. Following these methods, some have created problems that lack essential information or make no sense whatsoever.
Some 45 states and the District of Columbia have so far adopted Common Core standards, leaving students all around the United States to puzzle over mysterious logic and language devised in accordance with Common Core’s new methods.
Here are eleven Common Core–compliant problems that have caused parents, students, and even teachers to scratch their heads or respond in outrage:
1. Starting with an easily solvable problem, New York takes the simple “7+7? and complicates it with something called “number bonds.”
2. Not willing to ruin addition alone, educators take aim at subtraction as well, forcing students to make visual representations of numbers in columns.
3. This third-grade Common Core-compliant question asks students to match the shaded geometrical figures with their corresponding fractions. Problem is the figures aren’t shaded.
4. The first question on this first-grade math test, found by the Washington Post, makes one wonder how coins relate to cups.
5. From the same test, numbers 7 and 8 unnecessarily complicate simple arithmetic with odd, quadrilateral diagrams.
6. This question apparently eschews the use of rulers.
7. This “cheat sheet” provided to parents at an Atlanta elementary school provides definitions for some of Common Core’s Newspeak vocabulary, which throws out stuffily precise language like “add” and “subtract.” Under the obsolete math paradigm, students were bored by “word problems,” but in the new era they are challenged by “math situations.” And where a pre-enlightenment teacher might advise students to “borrow” a number when performing an equation, today’s kids are trained to “take a ten and regroup it as ten ones.”
8. Students now learn to visually show “doubles plus one . . .”
9. Apparently, “1” is a very blue number.
10. Last up: A math problem that isn’t a problem at all. In fact, the answer is stated at the very beginning.
— Alec Torres is a William F. Buckley Fellow at the National Review Institute.
Editor’s Note: This piece has been amended since its initial posting. [More] | |  |
| |  | | | The Real Thanksgiving Story | The Real Thanksgiving Story
(Editor: www.thereportcard Nathaniel Morton recorded the account of William Bradford of the journey of the Pilgrims, our courageous founders. Although they are much maligned on campus, and in the mainstream media, they gave true meaning and texture to what became the First Amendment. One cannot read these words and fail to understand what makes us exceptional and the hope of the world. The Wall Street Journal has printed this chronicle and editorial since 1961, and everyone, particularly young Americans should learn it by heart). [More] | | |
| |  | | | Corrupt School Unions | Rebecca Friedrichs | | Individual teachers are challenging a California law that forces all teachers to pay union dues whether or not they agree with how the union spends the money and even if they don’t belong to the union. The Rebecca Friedrichs, the teacher’s bringing the suit claims that the Teacher’s Union espouses radical views and uses union dues to proclaim those views. Ms. Friedrichs states: “As someone who has taught in the public schools for 28 years … in my view, every individual has the right to choose the organization that advocates on their behalf,” Friedrichs said. “I admire the history of unions and the spirit in which they were born. But in recent years, unions have become what they used to fight: powerful, entrenched organizations.” It should be pointed out that ever since Jimmy Carter allowed teacher’s unions to exist and collect dues, the Democrats have stood behind the unions and in return the unions have backed Democratic elected officials. This is often to the detriment of students. Last year, the NEA alone spent $40 Million to influence state and local elections. The case has been heard at the Supreme Court and an opinion will be issued). [More] | | |
| |  | | | civics textbook topics | | Racist White People?The next panelist, James Sabanthe, who teaches at Hononegah High School in Rockton, Illinois, heralded the new focus on “historical interpretations.” It became apparent from his, Millward’s and other teachers’ comments that although high school students are treated as adults who “think like historians,” they do not do the reading that real historians do. Because students do not read all 20 to 30 pages of a typical scholarly article, Sabanthe distributes excerpts among groups of students. As an example of an exercise, students would be asked to use their “historical thinking skills” to demonstrate change while comparing revolutions in France, Russia, and China, a conversation launched by asking students about prior knowledge of labor systems, Indians, servants, and racism.
For the unit on slavery, Sabanthe provided hand-outs, with sample readings. Half of his groups would tackle excerpts from Edmund S. Morgan’s “Slavery and Freedom: The American Paradox,” in The Journal of American History (June 1972), and Kathleen M. Brown’s Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, & Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (1996). The other half would read excerpts from Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (1998) by Ira Berlin, former president of OAH, and How Race Survived US History: From Settlement and Slavery to the Obama Phenomenon (2008) by David Roediger, who writes from a Marxist perspective. These groups would make “t charts” and Venn diagrams, and discuss similarities and differences between the excerpts.
But upon reading Sabanthe’s hand-out, it became clear the excerpts do not stand alone. Sometime surnames pop up, with prior references obviously in an omitted section. His assignment, to annotate the primary document, “’Decisions of the General Court’ regarding William Pierce’s Plantation, Virginia, 1640,” and relate it to Brown’s feminist tract, is bewildering. Students would need considerable direction. Instead of the full narrative of a textbook, history book, or full article that they could digest for themselves, students turn to their teacher for direction. Of course, this leaves wide open opportunities. [More] | | |
| | | | | The Report Card Org | William Korach | William Korach has held senior executive positions with Citibank, New England Life, and KPMG Consulting where he was responsible for implementing marketing technologies worldwide. Korach is a former Commander in the United States Naval Reserve who served on Active Duty during the 1960’s aboard the destroyer USS John R. Pierce and was recalled to active duty for Operation Desert Storm. At the close of Desert Storm, Korach wrote a paper for the Assistant Secretary of Defense on media coverage that was presented at the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government.
He was president of the Navy League of the United States, St Augustine Council in 2010, and has written articles for Sea Power Magazine on National Security. The Navy League sponsors youth programs like Sea Cadets and Naval Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps. Korach is an active instructor in these programs
Korach recently completed a history textbook Rock of the Republic because of his concern that America’s great heritage is no longer being taught in America’s schools. Mr. Korach, says: “I share the concern of David McCullough Pulitzer Prize winning author of 1776 and John Adams that our children’s ignorance of American history is a threat to national security.”
Twitt
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| | | | | FRC Action | Family Research Council | Family Research Council, was founded in 1992 to educate the general public and cultural leaders about traditional American values and to promote the philosophy of the Founding Fathers concerning the nature of ordered liberty.
FRC Action is a 501(c)(4), non-profit education and lobbying organization based in Washington, D.C. FRC Action is dedicated to preserving and advancing the interests of family, faith, and freedom in the political arena.
FRC Action seeks to fortify the traditional foundations of civil society through efforts to educate, inform and influence elected officials in support of the country's historic ideals of equality under the law, and the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness on which the nation was founded. [More] | | |
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M.R. Mathias 
