Bill Gates has now set the record straight over at USA Today, guess I won’t bother to type up this post because hey, “he said so” and if Bill says Common Core is GOOD, well, who am I to question.
From his holiness Master Gates:
“Americans want students to get the best education possible. We want schools to prepare children to become good citizens and members of a prosperous American economy. The Common Core standards were carefully conceived with these two goals in mind. It would be a shame if myths and misunderstandings got in the way.”
Hmmm…
Myths and Misunderstandings…
The parents and educators in Massachusetts who formed the Pioneer Institute and did the difficult work of building consensus around what a world class education looks like have chimed in on the facts surrounding the Common Core.
These are the people who took on the challenging task of hammering out what a real public education should look like, and you know what? When Bill gathered his little posse’ of consensus builders, he forgot to ask these guys for advice. Perhaps if he had hired a few of them to help write the history texts they would have argued with him that a four color page spread bio on the little God King would be Petty Tyrant known as the Maven of Microsoft might not be a good idea.
“And as national social studies standards now come rolling in they will also learn about new American heroes, like Common Core’s biggest funder, billionaire Bill Gates. One elementary school textbook published by Pearson, the giant international publishing company that has helped develop Common Core tests, contains several pages of tribute to him.”
I could just see all those editors who have dumped on us education activists for the past two years saying to themselves, “Oh Crap, now the education establishment and progressive left is dumping on Common Core too.”
I kinda feel sorry for the poor saps. Who knew a day would ever come when Glenn Beck and New York Educrats would ever agree on anything?
Funny…to read my Uncommon Lore education essays on Kindle click HERE! Jenny Hatch
Some amazing investigative reporting is being done by independent bloggers and journalists.
Mercedes Schneider wrote a most excellent “Follow the Money” expose of Bill Gates Common Core ties. Read the whole thing, she really nails him to a wall…HERE
This is a post about Bill Gates and his money, a brief audit of his Common Core (CCSS) purchases. Before I delve into Gates accounting, allow me to set the stage with a bit of CCSS background.
A Bit of CCSS Background
It is important to those promoting CCSS that the public believes the idea that CCSS is “state-led.” The CCSS website reports as much and names two organizations as “coordinating” the “state-led” CCSS: The National Governors Association (NGA), and the Council for Chief State School Officers (CCSSO). Interestingly, the CCSS website makes no mention of CCSS “architect” David Coleman:
The Common Core State Standards Initiative is a state-led effort coordinated by the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO). The standards were developed in collaboration with teachers, school administrators, and experts, to provide a clear and consistent framework to prepare our…
I have had an interesting chat this past week with one of the Pearson curriculum developers in the comment section tied to the post.
Jenny Hatch says:
May 7, 2013 at 4:20 pm
Common core proponents are yelling they are just offering standards to school boards and parents, not curriculum.
When the big progressive corporate powers that be bought out all of the Independent Math Curriculum Companies, they made certain to dumb them all down knowing that when curriculum committees went looking for a “world class” Math book, it really did not matter which one was chosen, because they all stunk.
Working for an Independent Math Curriculum Company, I can assure you that we have not all been bought out, nor have we been dumbed down. Have a look sometime… uh… suckas?
Your claim that “all serious Mathematicians agree, the original SAXON Math curriculum, especially the second edition, has no equal, and is the best in the marketplace” is far from accurate.
Reply
Jenny Hatch says:
May 7, 2013 at 9:53 pm
Hey Bowen,
Does your excellent, world class, bar none the best on the planet Math Curriculum have an accompanying “Remedial” program tied to it?
So that when the younguns’ use your materials approximately 33 1/2 % of the children need a Math Specialist and “Special” curriculum?
#HowTheGameIsPlayed
The thing is all of you specialists need to understand that a group of people are very much aware of the tactics beings used to dumb down American Children and we are not going to sit quietly down and just let this monstrosity percolate in the schools without trying to expose the frauds.
You need to “Simma Down”, taka a chill pill, and decide if you want to be a part of the problem or of the solution…
Jenny Hatch
Homeschooling Mom and General Rabble Rouser about #CommonCore
Reply
Bowen Kerins says:
May 8, 2013 at 8:20 pm
I don’t see myself as a specialist, I see myself as a former high school teacher who started writing books because I thought we could make something better than what existed. (That appears to be the same biography as Mr. Saxon.)
Today I spent the entire day working with math teachers in Lawrence, MA as they begin implementing a schoolwide curriculum at their high school for the first time in many years, and I am proud that they will be using our program, CME Project. We have previously shown success (in student achievement, efficacy, in standardized testing) in many other cities. CME Project is written by teachers with over 100 years of combined classroom experience, funded by the National Science Foundation, and field-tested for five years before publishing. Some of the work in CME Project was incorporated into the Common Core State Standards, particularly the Standards for Mathematical Practice intended to highlight eight deep goals of K-12 mathematics, such as persistent problem-solving, using precise language, and generalizing from repeated reasoning.
Our materials are built with a low-threshold, high-ceiling approach so that all … uhh, younguns’? … can learn and succeed. Our curriculum has very high standards, and students rise to meet those standards. Students learn math by working on math problems — good problems, connected to one another, with both short-term and long-term goals.
Our program comes with support for students who enter our curriculum below grade level, while continuing to ask those students to take on work at level. We have consistently found that students can and will take on challenging mathematical tasks if they are given the opportunity to work on them, gaining self-efficacy and perseverance through work.
None of this happens without high-quality teachers doing their work. I will always be grateful for the great work of these professionals. It’s an honor to work with teachers and students around the country, and a privilege to see our work succeeding in measurable ways.
However, it may instead be true that I am destroying America and am a complete fraud who needs to simmer down. I suggest you read through our curriculum, talk to teachers who use it, and get a sense of what we wrote and why we wrote it. The chance of this happening may be less than “approximately 33 1/2%” — seriously, why didn’t you just say “approximately one-third” — but I’m always glad to defend our work. Thanks for reading!
Reply
Jenny Hatch says:
May 9, 2013 at 12:00 pm
Bowen,
Thanks for explaining what you do.
I appreciate the overview mostly because Pearson has been fingered as the company with the most at stake in the Common Core rollout.
As a parent my biggest issue with the reading and math curriculums is the recidivism of the various companies.
And really, who can blame them with all that lovely money flowing in. Taxpayer money mostly.
My own research and frankly, national test scores, have proven year after year after year that nothing has changed, children are still being taught with materials DESIGNED to ensure that ONE THIRD of them will need remediation in math and reading.
With so many careers on the line and so much cash to be pumped into the glory hole of the cash cow that is American Education, WHO has the will to reform this glutonous system???
I think of the curriculum companies the same way I think of the Pharma companies who run Medicine.
When the business model DEPENDS on a high percentage of sickness and educational failure…well, I just do NOT believe Taxpayers should be funding this madness.
If we had a truly competitive private sector in education and medicine, with no taxpayer slush fund, everyone would be amazed to watch how quickly these sick systems of education and medicine reformed themselves.
But when every Johnnie and Susie has ten grand tucked away in their backpack every year to be doled out to whoever is smart enough to GO FOR THE GOLD, and when Johnnie and Susie have twenty grand per year if someone can just manage to get them labeled reading or math challenged…
Well, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist or even a Math specialist, (sorry, teacher) to crunch them numbers…
Happy Trails!
Jenny Hatch
And today over at the Utahns against Common Core Blog a devastating Math Post outlined the stark difference between Common Core approved Math Textbooks and Saxon Math.
Several years ago I was involved in what has been called “The Math Wars”. Alpine School District had quit teaching the times tables, long division, and some other basic math skills, to children under the promise that a constructivist (ie. children need to construct their own knowledge) approach to math would deepen their skills. This was an abominable failure. Even at BYU where 2 math education professors got permission (by someone over the math department’s dead body) to teach a class of honors calculus to freshmen with this method. The result was a disaster. Honors calculus students measuring Dixie Cups with rulers while regular students were learning how to integrate. Predictably to everyone but those 2 professors teaching the constructivist class, their students scored below all 17 sections of non-honors calculus on the final exam. Their final defeat? Blame it on the test writer who had been creating the same test from the same objectives for years…
Now the big lie. Current research says there are NO studies that support constructivism. Dr. Jim Milgram, Stanford math professor who has been and may still currently be the only educator invited to serve on NASA’s advisory board, noted that if constructivist math were a success, NASA would be looking for students that went through that pedagogy. The fact is, BYU’s math education professors’ failure is typical of constructivist programs.
There is only one conclusion. Following the USOE’s math recommendations will kill STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) initiatives. All you business leaders and technology oriented professionals supporting Common Core are going to be in for a rude awakening as this machine destroys love of math, destroys math skills, and destroys any edge Utah has for technology…unless…
Utah must drop Common Core and restore local control. The USOE is hell-bent on constructivism and unless there is a major personnel change at the USOE, it’s going to rest on the shoulders of parents to take their children’s education into their own hands (literally), and leave those who can’t get the support at home to drown in fuzzy math.
In 2006 or so, Brett Moulding, state curriculum director at the USOE invited me to his office to ask a simple question. “Oak, you’re a parent who is very involved in your children’s education. How can we replicate that to other parents?”
“Easy,” I replied. “Just implement Investigations math statewide and you’ll have all the parental involvement you can handle.”
True story. I just had no idea they were going to take my suggestion literally. Parents, you may seriously want to consider The Great Escape…Homeschooling.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates told a recent TED conference, an organization which is sponsored by one of the largest toxic waste polluters on the planet, that vaccines need to be used to reduce world population figures in order to solve global warming and lower CO2 emissions.
Stating that the global population was heading towards 9 billion, Gates said, “If we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services (abortion), we could lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 per cent.”
Quite how an improvement in health care and vaccines that supposedly save lives would lead to a lowering in global population is an oxymoron, unless Gates is referring to vaccines that sterilize people, which is precisely the same method advocated in White House science advisor John P. Holdren’s 1977 textbook Ecoscience, which calls for a dictatorial “planetary regime” to enforce draconian measures of population reduction via all manner of oppressive techniques, including sterilization.
After presenting an equation that included the number of people on the planet and CO2 emissions, Gates said, “Probably one of these numbers is going to get pretty near to zero.”
Later in the presentation, Gates mentions picking a vaccine, “which is something I love,” that would be used to lower global CO2 emissions.
He also advocates pouring more money into the global warming scam by way of the United Nations, as well as a “CO2 tax” and cap and trade, while making it clear that the developed world would have to reduce its living standards by cutting back on essential services that generate CO2.
Last night we had an epic, packed, storming of the castle at the Utah State Capitol. Over four hundred people jammed into the capitol to demand a cease and desist on Common Core.
And today over at the Utahns against Common Core Blog a devastating Math Post outlined the stark difference between Common Core approved Math Textbooks and Saxon Math.
