The pursuit of Constitutionally grounded governance, freedom
and individual liberty
"There
is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it
steadily." --George
Washington
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Classroom chaos? Critics blast new Common Core education
standards by Diane Diederich
A
full year before students around the nation submit to the new Common Core
standardized tests, the federally-backed program is already causing chaos and
confusion at local school board meetings, in the classroom and at the dinner
table. What do you know? What do you need to know?
As critics fear Washington is poised to take control
of what and how local districts teach kids, school administrators are adopting
new curriculum in an effort to ensure their students outperform their peers and
parents worry that their children are being used as academic guinea pigs. As
the program gets closer to full implementation, a full-blown backlash is developing despite assurances from supporters
that it is merely a test aimed at establishing a national standard.
“Common Core is forcing districts to
re-think math curriculum. And in cases like ours, they are making poor
decisions.” - Kelly Crisp, parent from Fairfield, Conn.
“It’s just now reaching their school
districts and their children’s schools and they want to know, ‘What is this,
and why is it being forced on us?’” said the Cato Institute’s Neil McCluskey.
When 90 percent of states signed on to subject K-12
students to the Common Core math and English standards being pushed by the
federal government, the program looked like an unqualified success. Kids around
the nation would be tested once a year in grades 3-8 in math and English
language arts, and once in high school, either in the 10th or 11th grades.
Finally, students throughout the country could be measured by the same
yardstick, long before taking college entrance exams. Local districts that
excelled at educating children could be singled out, and ones who lagged could
also be identified in order to address problems.
But if what happened in New York and Kentucky, two
of the 45 states that have signed on to the Common Core State Standards
Initiative, is any indication, the chaos has only just begun. Those states administered their own
standardized tests aligned with Common Core, and the results were disastrous.
Just 31 percent of New York students in the third through eighth grades were
deemed proficient in math and English on the new tests, down about 50 percent
from the traditional test given the year before. Kentucky, which also
implemented its own Common Core-aligned tests, experienced similar declines in
scores.
Other states are waiting until at least 2014-15 to
implement Common Core tests that are still in development. But at the state and
district level, educators are tinkering with the curriculum in the hopes of
having students prepared for the new tests – sometimes with disastrous results.
In the affluent town of Fairfield, Conn., the school district last year adopted
a new math curriculum for eighth- and ninth-graders called College Preparatory
Math, with an eye toward the looming Common Core tests. But a year later, standardized test scores dipped and, according to one
parent, Kelly Crisp, kids who had always done well in math were left
disillusioned with the subject.
Five parents filed a complaint with the state over
use of the new Algebra 1 book, and, after a protracted battle, forced the
district to establish an "instructional online interactive forum" for
Algebra 1 students and adopt new regulations for pilot programs as part of a
settlement on the controversy over use of a textbook. Crisp said she worries about some 800 students who spent a year
studying from a textbook hastily adopted in the frenzy to align with Common
Core. The district later disavowed the book.
“Common Core is forcing districts to re-think math
curriculum,” Crisp said. “And in cases like ours, they are making poor
decisions.” McCluskey said school districts are “flailing to try to adopt
curriculum that will prepare students for Common Core, but there is no real
standard. “What we’re seeing is the
market flooded with curriculum that claims to be Common Core aligned,”
McCluskey said. While the Obama administration has embraced Common
Core, the plan was actually drawn up
by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School
Officers. Carissa Miller, deputy executive director of Council of Chief
State School Officers, bristles at the suggestion that Common Core seeks to
impose a Washington-based, politically correct curriculum on local districts. “It’s
a misperception,” Miller said. “States have had standards for a long time. This would just set common standards, and
standards are not curriculum.” As an example, Miller cites a
third-grade writing standard in which students must be able to recall
information from print or digital sources, write notes on it and then sort it
into relevant categories. The process, Miller notes, is the same for all
students. But the source materials used to prepare for it are up to the teacher
or district.
David Coleman, whose
nonprofit Student Achievement Partners was hired by the National Governors
Association to design the Common Core standards, said parents should look at
the standards set forth before deciding whether they are good or bad for their
children. “They are a set of standards that we expect kids to know,” said
Coleman, now president of the College Board, where he is redesigning the SAT to
reflect Common Core standards.. “It is not taking away any kind of state or
district rights to say how or what kids are taught. "Any
time you do something new, there’s always concern. It is valid for parents to
be concerned. But with more information, it will become apparent that this is
simply setting a high bar and having a uniform standard across the nation.”
Proponents say that because Common Core only applies
to math and reading, fears that revisionist history or agenda-driven social
studies will find their way into K-12 textbooks are unfounded. But in McCluskey’s
words, “standards are designed to set a box around curriculum,” meaning whatever is on the test will have
to be taught.
Phyllis Schlafly of The Eagle Forum goes even
further.
“Common Core means federal control of
school curriculum, i.e., control by Obama administration left-wing
bureaucrats,” wrote Schlafly. “The control mechanism is the tests (called
assessments). Kids must pass the tests in order to get a high school diploma or
admittance to college. If they haven’t studied a curriculum based on Common
Core standards, they won’t score well on the tests.”
What do you now know and what are you
going to do?
~~~~~~
Obama seeks an accomplice - He asks from a Congress he disdains
the backing he considers superfluous George Will is a columnist
for the Washington Post
Because Syria’s convulsion has become as serious as Barack Obama has been
careless in speaking about it, he is
suddenly and uncharacteristically insisting that Congress participate in
governance. Regarding institutional derangements, he is the infection against
which he pretends to be an immunization.
In the Illinois Legislature, he voted “present” 129 times to avoid
difficulties; now he stoops from his
executive grandeur to tutor Congress on accountability. In Washington, where he condescends as a
swan slumming among starlings, he insists that, given the urgency of everything
he desires, he “can’t wait” for Congress to vote on his programs or to confirm
persons he nominates to implement them. The virtues of his policies and
personnel are supposedly patent and sufficient to justify imposing both by
executive decrees.
In foreign policy, too, he luxuriates in acting, as most modern presidents have
improvidently done, without the tiresome persuasion required to earn
congressional ratifications. Without
even a precipitating event such as Syria’s poison gas attack, and without any
plausible argument that an emergency precluded deliberation, he waged
protracted war against Libya with bombers and cruise missiles but without
Congress.
Now, concerning Syria, he lectures Congress, seeking an accomplice while talking about accountability.
Perhaps he deserves Congress’ complicity – if he can persuade it that he can
achieve a success he can define. If
success is a “shot across the bow” of Syria’s regime, he cannot fail: By avoiding
the bow, such a shot merely warns of subsequent actions.
Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has advertised
his skepticism about intervening in Syria. His very public intrusion in a policy debate may exceed what is proper
for the uniformed military, but he seems to have played Obama as dexterously as
Duke Ellington played a piano. Dempsey assured Obama that the military
mission could be accomplished a month from now. (Because the bow will still be
there to be shot across?) This enabled Obama to say that using the military to
affirm an international norm (about poison gas), although urgent enough to
involve Congress, is not so urgent that Congress’ recess required abbreviation.
[Note: Dempsey has since admitted he did not know the mission]
Britain’s Parliament inadvertently
revived the constitutional standing of the U.S. Congress when Prime Minister
David Cameron’s incompetent management of the vote resulted in Parliament
refusing to authorize an attack. His fumble was a function of Obama’s
pressuring him for haste.
If Parliament had authorized an attack – seven switched votes would have
sufficed – Obama probably would
already have attacked, without any thought about Congress’ prerogatives.
The Financial Times’ Gideon Rachman reports that in an Aug. 24 telephone conversation with Cameron, Obama “made it clear
that he wanted a swift military response – before global outrage dissipated and
Bashar al-Assad’s regime had the chance to prepare its defenses.”
Obama’s sanctimony about his moral
superiority to a Congress he considers insignificant has matched his hypocrisy
regarding his diametrically opposed senatorial and presidential understandings
of the proper modalities regarding uses of military force. Now he asks from the
Congress he disdains an authorization he considers superfluous. By asking,
however reluctantly, he begins the urgent task of lancing the boil of executive
presumption. And surely he understands the perils of being denied an
authorization he has sought, then treating the denial as irrelevant.
~~~~~~
We Will Never Forget: State Knew Benghazi Was Terrorist
Attack Within Minutes By Andrea Billups
The State Department knew minutes after the siege
began that terrorists were attacking the U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya, a
new book about the tragedy concludes. Just 25 minutes in, as 35 gun-toting
jihadists stormed the compound, the State Department received a cable advising
it of the attack. The U.S. Embassy in Tripoli also was contacted by a security
official assigned to protect U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens, say the authors of
the new book, "Under Fire, the Untold Story of the Attack on
Benghazi," according to The Washington Examiner.
The book, by former State Diplomatic Security Agent Fred Burton and co-author
Samuel Katz, an international counterterrorism expert, dives deep into the
timeline and details of the Benghazi attack. It also refutes many of the early
assertions by the Obama administration that the assault, which killed Stevens
and three others, was sparked by an anti-Muslim film produced in the United
States. The book builds the case,
using eyewitness accounts of many on the ground in Benghazi, that it was indeed
an act of terrorism that occurred 11 years after the historic 9/11
attacks. It marked what the authors called "an opening salvo of a new
jihad on the African continent."
Despite the political wrangling and embarrassment for the Obama administration,
the tragic event could not be viewed as anything other than terrorism, the
authors found. "So much about the
night just didn’t make sense, but one question everyone was asking was, 'Where
were the good guys?’ Two and a half hours of war had been waged in the city of
Benghazi and everyone in the know — and many who weren't — were aware that the
U.S. presence in the city was under full-scale attack," the book
concludes. "There were no
cavalry charge of men in white hats eager to save the day and rescue the
besieged American positions. None of the militias — not even the one on the
State Department payroll — had mobilized their forces to mount a large-scale
and deterring show of force." Among
other things reported in the book: Hillary
Clinton, on her last day as secretary of state, presented four of the five
diplomatic security agents who were present during the Benghazi attack with the
State Department's "Award for Heroism." If there was no act of terror
in Benghazi, why?
~~~~~~
Liar Obama: 'I Didn't Set a Red Line' on Syria By Susan Jones
A year ago, President Barack Obama used the phrase "red line" twice,
to make the point that Syria's use of chemical weapons "would change my
calculations significantly" on intervening in the civil war. But on Wednesday in Sweden -- echoing
comments made by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Tuesday -- Obama told reporters,
"First of all, I didn't set a red
line. The world set a red line. The world set a red line when governments
representing 98 percent of the world's population said the use of chemical
weapons are abhorrent and passed a treaty forbidding their use even when
countries are engaged in war." "Congress set a red line when
it ratified that treaty," and when it passed the Syria Accountability Act,
Obama added. Posture in haste, repent at leisure. Barack Obama drew a very public red line
with Syria, threatening American intervention if chemical weapons got used in
the civil war taking place since the Arab Spring of 2011. Now that US, NATO,
and Israeli intel shows that chemical weapons have been deployed, everyone’s
looking at the White House to see whether Obama meant what he said.
~~~~~~
"[T]he
propitious smiles of Heaven, can never be expected on a nation that disregards
the eternal rules of order and right, which Heaven itself has ordained."–George Washington, First Inaugural
Address, 1789
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