Sunday, March 30, 2014

Common Core emerges as potent election issue for fed-up parents

◼ Parents across the country may hold the key to this year's mid-term elections as they vent their anger over the implementation of a controversial education achievement measure called the Common Core State Standards Initiative. - FOX

...many parents see the initiative as a bid by the federal government to take over the education system. They are also angry over the "data mining" of students' personal information, and say the stepped-up standards are not age-appropriate and are leading to anxiety and depression in their children.

Analysts warn the parental opposition could spill over into the November elections.

"You really have a populist reaction, and that's true on the left and the right," says Tom Loveless, a senior fellow with the Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings Institute in Washington, D.C.

He predicts candidates opposing politicians from the establishment - or "at least trying to paint them as establishment candidates" - will take up the parental concerns.

"Those populist candidates are running against the Common Core, and they are going to say Washington is interfering with children's schooling and that teachers, parents and principals at the local level are better equipped to decide on what kids learn," he said.

Concurring is education expert Joy Pullmann.

"Common Core opposition is so completely grassroots, and support is so astroturf, " says the education research fellow for The Heartland Institute, a think tank headquartered in Chicago that promotes individual liberty and free enterprise.


◼ This second grader’s revenge against Common Core math will make your day - Daily Caller

The litany of frighteningly stupid Common Core math worksheets never ends. Perhaps now, though, kids are starting to fight back in satisfyingly creative ways.

An alert reader sent The Daily Caller this image of her seven-year-old son’s perfectly reasonable homework answer. The boy attends a public elementary school in San Jose, Calif. He is in the second grade....

The constantly burgeoning inventory of sad and hideous Common Core math problems is very long.


Just this month, for example, a frustrated dad posted his kid’s absurd Common Core-aligned math homework on Instagram. ◼ (RELATED: ‘Why are they making math harder?’ More absurd Common Core math problems)


In February, a group of Common Core-aligned math — math — lessons oozed out of the woodwork which require teachers to ask students if the 2000 presidential election was fair and which refer to Lincoln’s religion as either “liberal” or nothing. ◼ (RELATED: Common Core MATH lesson plans attack Reagan, list Lincoln’s religion as ‘liberal’)◼ link



In January, The Daily Caller also brought you a surreal, subtly cruel Common Core math worksheet. ◼ (RELATED: This Common Core math worksheet offers a glimpse into Kafkaesque third-grade hell)


January also brought a set of incomprehensible directions for nine-year-olds. ◼ (RELATED: Here’s another impossibly stupid Common Core math worksheet)



In December, Twitchy found the most egregiously awful math problem the Common Core had produced yet until that point. ◼ (RELATED: Is this Common Core math question the worst math question in human history?)

In November, Twitchy collected several more incomprehensible, unintentionally hilarious Core-aligned worksheets and tests. ◼ (RELATED: EPIC FAIL: Parents reveal insane Common Core worksheets)

Over the summer, The Daily Caller exposed a video showing a curriculum coordinator in suburban Chicago perkily explaining that Common Core allows students to be totally right if they say 3 x 4 = 11 as long as they spout something about the necessarily faulty reasoning they used to get to that wrong answer. ◼ (RELATED: Obama math: under new Common Core, 3 x 4 = 11 [VIDEO])
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