Some of What's Wrong With Common Core

I don't like the Common Core math standards.  They're a step down from what California has had for the past 15 years.  This article hits it out of the park:

There is also some willful deception or self-deception here.  If you state that henceforth all children should be able to do X, because that’s the new standard, does this mean that all children can do X?  Can even half the children do X?  Read some of the verbose standards, and you’ll probably conclude that virtually no kid can do X.

There seems to be a belief in magic.  Outline impressive goals (“internationally benchmarked,” no less) in a technical, officious way, and every kid will automatically soar to high levels.  But why would that happen?  Teachers still have to teach, and students still have to learn the information, fact by fact.  But our Education Establishment hates all those traditional practices.  It’s so much simpler to proclaim that henceforth all children will be college- and career-ready.  Presto!  That was easy.

Bill Gates and Common Core are obsessed with arranging things in standardized patterns, coast to coast.  So we must have standards that will somehow apply to everyone.  Then we need identical curricula, and we’ll need identical tests.  All of these things will be aligned to each other and symmetrically arranged, like so many neat stacks of boxes in a shoe store’s warehouse.  And no one, from that point forward, will be able to think outside those boxes, try something new, or tell the Education Establishment to take a hike and stop annoying us...

I suspected from the start that Common Core would be a fraud and a failure for a simple reason: it recycled all the bad theories and methods from the last 75 years....  (boldface mine--Darren)

I’m not sure whether they tricked (Core Supporter Bill) Gates or he let himself be tricked.  But everybody knows by now that Common Core accepted all the worst nonsense in Reform Math.  (That’s why we see so many articles and stories about impossible math homework.)  Similarly, Constructivism is the official dogma throughout Common Core.  This quackery orders teachers not to teach; students must figure out everything for themselves.  Similarly again, Common Core embraced sophistries from Whole Word, those sophistries being the cause of our illiteracy problem...

Bill Gates was seeing a world where every seventh-grade history class would be identical to all the others, as if that’s more efficient.  Ideally for him, they would use books and software created by his companies.  But never mind how much Gates makes.  We wouldn't mind if the children were being well-educated.  But he was in cahoots with people who had never been primarily interested in making children well-educated.  The goal, ever since the time of John Dewey, was to make children cooperative, largely incapable of independent thought, and easy to govern.  (boldface mine--Darren)

Back in the 90s we saw what happened when fuzzy math and so-called whole language were the rule of the day.  They're back, 15 years later, and probably won't go away till I retire in about 15 more years.  What's sad is that I'm not paid to teach, I'm paid to do what the bosses tell me.  I've been teaching for 17 years; for the remainder of my time I'll get paid to help dumb down our students.

My role will warp into that of a fireman in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.

Update:  You don't like the dig at Dewey above?   This quote is attributed to him:

Independent self people (would be) a counterproductive anachronism in the collective society of the future [...] (where) people will be defined by their associations.

I don't know if he actually said it or not--but it sounds like something he'd say.  Perhaps it's genuine, perhaps it's "fake but accurate".