OBAMACORE Part II

Today two news stories have been printed.

"It's exactly what critics of the Common Core school curriculum warned about:  Partisan political statements masquerading as English lessons finding their way into elementary school classrooms.

Teaching materials aligned with the controversial national educational standars ask fifth-graders to edit such sentences as "(The president) makes sure the laws of the country are fair,"  "The wants of an individual are less important than the well-being of the nation" and "the commands of government officials must be obeyed by all."  The sentences, which appear in worksheets published by New Jersey-based Pearson Education, are presented not only for their substance, but also to teach children how to streamline bulky writing.

Did someone resurrect Stalin to outline this program?

Every time a Common Core proponent tells me I am imagining things evidence seems to show up that makes my imagination very, very, vivid.

Another story today comes from Georgia.   When elementary school children returned from Thanksgiving vacation all Christmas cards had been removed from the teacher's bulletin boards.   Apparently no religious holiday will be allowed.   Let us see if that will apply to the fabricated holiday of Kwanzaa.        

Part II of "OBAMACORE" 
BY:   Gamaliel Isaac

Is Curriculum the Cause of America’s Poor Worldwide Education Rank?

You can have the best curriculum in the world but if there is no discipline you can’t teach it.  A school staffer at Overbrook High School in Philadelphia told CBS that:

 "It's mayhem. Students are in the halls, they're smoking in the bathroom; cigarettes, marijuana," said a worker at the school, who asked not to be identified. "We can't contain them and it's really hazardous for us working and these kids are not being educated at all."

"It's a zoo in here. Parents really need to come up here and see what's going on in this school because it's ridiculous,"

Asian students who want to study are assaulted by blacks.  In 2010, a federal judge found that black students at South Philadelphia High School had assaulted and harassed Asian students daily -- for years but the principal said she did not call police because she did not want to "criminalize" the black students.

Laws prevent public schools from taking effective action to stop the violence.  John Hood in an article for the Foundation of Economic Education wrote:

“A host of administrative decisions, court rulings, and legislative actions have created such a maze of regulations that school principals and teachers are often unable to exercise meaningful control over their schools. Furthermore, the prevailing “ethos” in the education establishment—made up of researchers, administrators, and bureaucrats—is suspicious of many forms of punishment, and exhibits a fixation with “sensitivity training” and building self-esteem among students.”

                One would think that if the Obama administration was serious about improving education they would remove the regulations that interfere with classroom discipline.  Instead in response to higher number of blacks being suspended than whites, President Obama issued an “executive order” which effectively placed “quotas” on school discipline based on race.  If there are more disruptive blacks than Chinese in a school and you suspend the blacks you could face possible civil rights violation charges.

    I often walk by what was once the Irving School in New York.   The discipline at the Irving school was so bad that pupils threw a chair out of a window and killed a woman walking below.   It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that academic performance was unlikely to have been stellar at the Irving School.

            The performance of the pupils in the Irving school was low even by New York City standards; in fact it was so low that the Bloomberg administration decided to give the school an ultimatum.  They were told to make curriculum changes and that if the scores of the school didn't go up they'd be closed.   The teachers made the curriculum changes, the students continued to fail and the school was closed.   The school might have had a chance if instead of changing the curriculum police had been stationed in the hallways.

The building that housed the Irving School now houses one of the Success Academy Charter schools.  That school outperforms most New York City schools.  One of the reasons it does is discipline.  According to Insideschools.org, Success Academy schools are famous for a no-nonsense attitude toward bad behavior. Defiant kids who don't obey the conspicuously posted school rules quickly earn punishments ranging from brief timeouts to school suspensions.

There is evidence that American classrooms that are disciplined perform well.  African American and Hispanic students have more discipline problems than white students.  The filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan pointed out in the New York Post that if you pull out schools which are predominantly African-American and Hispanic, the data show that the rest of the kids are being taught better in America than anywhere else in the world.

The Common Core curriculum is likely to reduce discipline.  The Common Core Curriculum requires that teachers teach boring informational texts such as long passages in EPA handbooks about insulation levels.  Jeremiah Chaffee, a high school English teacher in upstate New York wrote that he was struck by how out of sync the Common Core is with what he considers to be good teaching and that “Such pedagogy makes school wildly boring.”  One alarmed high-school English teacher, reporting on a Common Core training session that used the Gettysburg Address as an example, noted that teachers were instructed to read the speech aloud to the class not as Lincoln would have spoken it, with power and emotion, but rather without inflection.  A past president of the National Council of Teachers of English declared herself “aghast at the vision of the dreariness and harshness of the classrooms [the standards-writers] attempt to create.”

If the creators of Common Core want children to learn they should be designing a curriculum that instills a love of learning instead of making learning an unpleasant chore.  If they want disciplined classrooms they should make the material exciting.   If the U.S. government wants Americans to be more competitive on the world stage, instead of creating boring curricula, its primary focus should be repealing laws that prevent administrators from bringing discipline to the classroom.