Designed, without doubt, to be the testing delivery system to guarantee another generation of harder tests and more school meltdowns and subsequent takeovers, the arrogant education antiquarians in charge of CorpEd's strategies seriously under-estimated the wrath and power of parents, teachers, students, and the man on the street. The fight, for sure, is not over, but the bruising and withering criticism of CorpEd's Core scheme appears to be cresting into a massive wave, and the landfall of the tsunami appears to be only a matter of time. The think-tank propagandists, the hedge fund scum, the technocratic twits, and the plutocratic bosses can only watch from their penthouse of cards on the beach.
Had it not been for the support of a black president for this just-awful idea of curriculum concretization designed to benefit no one except the billionaires and their hangers-on of the ed industry, this Business Roundtable bullying blitzkrieg might have worked, and the new test delivery vehicles might have been idling in front of every school in America this morning.
But with the "socialisit-in-chief" supporting it, those financially-suffering souls of the hinterlands, now motivated as they are by Fox News hate speech to exploit their only remaining advantage of whiteness, rose up against it en masse, along with all the progressives who knew that the Core was rotten from the beginning and nothing more than another trillion dollar scheme inspired by the U. S. Chamber of Commerce to complete the job that NCLB had begun.
Part of the story of the coming wave and Gates' seawall of cash from Politico:
. . . . The debate over the standards has roiled
political campaigns and dominated education policy debates for more than a
year. Now it’s rocketing into pop culture — and opponents hope that will prove
a tipping point.
The latest flash point came this week,
when Louis C.K. tweeted to his 3.3 million followers: “My kids used to love
math. Now it makes them cry. Thanks standardized testing and common core!” He
followed that with several pictures of third-grade math
problems he deemed incomprehensible or just plain dumb. Within a
day, his original protest had been retweeted more than 7,000 times.
The tweets point to a serious liability
for the Common Core. Proponents desperately want to focus attention on the goal
of raising academic standards and preparing American students to compete in a
global economy. But parents want to talk about their children sobbing over
nonsensical homework and vomiting from test-day jitters — and those are the stories
that resonate, especially on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert
picked up on all that social media angst and amplified it with a
segment a few weeks ago that ridiculed befuddling math questions. Judy Blume,
Maya Angelou and Matt Damon have also weighed in with critiques on standardized
testing.
The populist attack on Common Core isn’t
always fair: Some of the most widely mocked examples of so-called Common Core
math were featured in textbooks and used in classrooms long before the
standards were introduced. The blame for some of the confusing assignments
rests on individual teachers, not the standards, which lay out what children
should learn in each grade but don’t presume to dictate lesson plans or
homework. And high-stakes testing was introduced long before the Common Core —
and is stressful for some kids regardless of what the exams cover.
Opposition activist Jim Stergios says he
would prefer to focus on more sober-minded critiques of the “mediocre quality,
dubious legality and outsized costs” of the Common Core. But he can’t say he’s
displeased that complaints about the standards have become a pop-culture meme.
“You know that discomfort and even
outright opposition has reached a critical mass when the core becomes a
frequent punch line in the repertoire of late-night comedians,” said Stergios,
executive director of the Pioneer Institute, a Boston think tank.
And supporters acknowledge, with
considerable frustration, that the campaign is taking a toll.
. . . .
They were introduced with great fanfare
as the next generation of standardized tests. They require students to write
more, to analyze complex texts and, in some cases, to perform hands-on
experiments in the classroom. Backers hoped parents would embrace them as far
more challenging and meaningful than the traditional fill-in-the-bubble
multiple choice.
But because of all those new components,
the exams are longer than many states’ former assessments. They’re taken on
computers, which this spring have proved vulnerable to crashes, server outages
and even cyberterrorism.
Common Core exams are graded on a far
tougher curve, leading to huge failure
rates in states that adopted them last year. And to top it all
off, the recent tests given to students in New York featured questions
studded with brand names like Nike and iPod, raising concerns
about commercialization.
Any parents who saw benefits in the new
exams were swiftly drowned out by the chorus of protests on social media.
By the tens of thousands, parents have
refused to let their children take the tests. They have taken to social media
to explain why. And their fury has seeped into pop culture.
Colbert aired a series of clips of
parents explaining how the tests had rattled and stressed their children. His
wry conclusion: “Common Core testing is preparing students for what they’ll
face as adults – pointless stress and confusion.”
The stress of standardized testing also
caught the attention of more than 120 authors and illustrators of children’s
literature, who last fall issued a public letter
to President Barack Obama expressing alarm at the administration’s education
reform agenda. “Our public school students spend far too much time preparing
for reading tests and too little time curling up with books that fire their
imaginations,” they wrote.
Among the signatories: beloved and
widely respected authors such as Angelou, Blume and Jules Feiffer.
Actor Damon has taken on the
anti-testing crusade, too. Common Core foes have hailed his 2011 speech
to a pro-public-school rally, in which he called for teachers to have more
autonomy to run their classrooms as they see fit. To rousing cheers, Damon
listed the qualities that he said had fueled his success and brought him the
most joy in life: imagination, curiosity, a passion for writing, a love of
learning. “None of these qualities,” he said, “can be tested.”
Hollywood elites aren’t always welcome
in grass-roots campaigns, but many Common Core opponents have rushed to embrace
Damon, Colbert and especially Louis C.K., citing their involvement as proof
that concerns about the new standards are resonating far beyond the tea party
groups that have been among the reform effort’s most aggressive
and visible foes.
It’s one thing to have Norris assert
that the standards are being used by “the feds … to usurp power over public
schools and influence young American minds.” Or for Glenn Beck to label the
Common Core an “insidious menace” that opened the door to “leftist
indoctrination.”
It’s another thing entirely to have a
popular comedian — a comedian who once, in all sincerity, declared Obama his personal
hero — tell the world the Common Core is making his children
cry.
. . . .
So far, the opposition hasn’t overturned
the Common Core in any state other than Indiana. But at least 11 states have
backed out of commitments to use shared Common Core assessments. And the
movement to scrap the standards altogether remains very much alive in several
states, including South Carolina, Missouri and Louisiana, where Gov. Bobby
Jindal recently recanted his previous support and urged the Legislature to
reject the Common Core.
Common Core proponents have plenty of money
to fight back. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has spent nearly $200
million so far to develop and promote the standards, and the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce and Business Roundtable have poured in
resources, as well. They have the support of the Obama
administration and the national teachers unions, which have raised concerns
about how the standards are implemented in practice but continue to support
them in principle. . . .
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