The Dissident Prof has been working hard and this week three of her articles have been published. They’re all on education and all deal with various aspects of Common Core.
Thanks to the great public outcry, more and more politicians are shying away from Common Core. It’s as if the name became toxic. Even the president sidestepped the label in his State of the Union Address, referring to the “Race to the Top,” the contest for stimulus funds by which the federal standards were slipped in. I tell you what all the nice-sounding phrases about education really mean in my FrontPage article, “The State of the Dis-Union: Preparing World Citizens."
(Beware: name-changing is a way to fool the people.)
At the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, I describe how Common Core is going to make things worse for the humanities in our colleges and universities, particularly in English departments. That's why those concerned with higher education also need to fight Common Core. Read “Too Late to Save English Departments?"
At the Weekly Standard in "Top-down Parental Involvement," I describe what I saw at the 2014 Georgia Family Engagement Conference in Athens, Georgia. It’s a trickle-down action: the feds tell the states what to do, the states tell the districts what to do, the districts tell the schools what to do. Finally, they get to “parental engagement”—telling parent-taxpayers what they can and cannot do in their children's schools. As can be expected, the parent-volunteers valiantly trying to save schools got the feds’ version on Common Core at the conference. The session called “Giving Students a Chance: Understanding the Georgia Common Core Performance Standards" was a joke. Such conferences are also revelatory for how Title I administrators think. One of the many Georgia Title I administrators enjoying this confab revealed that being a high-poverty Title I school that receives federal funds is a good thing because of all the goodies the schools get. As Ronald Reagan said, the closest thing to eternal life on earth is a federal bureaucracy.
Finally, there will be an anti-Common Core rally at the Georgia state capitol on Tuesday, February 4. Details about the rally, legislation, and thngs you can do are here at Stop Common Core in Georgia. Come on out!
