Haslam Water Carrier, Jon Alfuth, Claims to Be the Voice of Teachers

Jon Alfuth has tapped in to the main artery of corporate welfare education reform schooling in Tennessee, with a blog up called Bluff City Education, where Alfuth leads a team of fellow TFA cult members in massaging and pasting up all the news that corporate education reformers want to frame for educator and parent consumption in West Tennessee.  

As a former drum major at UWisconsin-Madison, Jon is now leading the corporate reform school parade in Tennessee.  Who is Jon Alfuth?  

This is from his LinkedIn profile:

Jon has a post up today to announce the public portal that Haslam and his TFA Commissioner, Kevin Huffman, have offered for "public input" on what is wrong with the Common Core?  

This exercise in time killing and public spleen venting is based on the assumption that the rotted Common Core is innocent until proven guilty.  This clear sentiment is expressed in the seeping self-righteousness of Alfuth's announcement of the new site.  

This week the Governor unveiled the first step in his “full vetting of common core,” an online portal where any Tennessean can provide comments on the standards English or Math in any grade.

I took some time to complete the review process for my own content area (geometry) and wanted to provide a brief review of my experience with the portal. Overall I was very satisfied with the process. It is easy to use and puts the burden of proof on those who thing something needs to be changed. I truly believe that it should lead to a strong evidence-based review of our Tennessee State Standards.

First of all, it should be noted that Alfuth is a self-proclaimed math teacher, since none of this higher education coursework was in math education.   What he knows about teaching math, he learned on the backs of poor people's children at a charter chain gang in Memphis.

As for the “burden of proof” here, that load should be on the Governor and his corporate pals, who rammed through this untried and unstudied testing delivery system without a shred of evidence that any aspect of CCSS will have any positive effects on learning.

While the positive effects for technology companies and the testing-industrial companies will be too large to count, there have been no pilot studies conducted and no feedback gathered in early testing sites like New York, where 70 percent of kids failed the test in 2013. 

What percentage of failures would you predict in Tennessee??

If you want to understand the origins and likely outcomes of Common Core, get this documentary for just over $20.