Education Commissioner Kevin Huffman told reporters earlier Tuesday that one misconception is that common core is a curriculum, “and it’s not.”“The common core is a set of standards that says your child should know ‘X’ at the end of the year,” he said. “The curriculum is still up to local schools and local districts, the way it always has been.”
While it's nice to say that "the curriculum is still up to local schools and local districts, the way it always has been," the reality is that the same Common Core "assessments" will be given in many different states, thus making what local schools and local districts can emphasize much less, uh, local.
The point is, Mr Ex-Michelle Rhee is playing a bait and switch game here, like many reformers, to fool people into thinking the Common Core is not something developed, funded and promoted by a very small reform cadre far from the local school districts and shoved down the throats of the states while most people weren't paying attention.
Now that people are waking up to the reality of the Common Core - and the national tests that will go along with them - they're not liking what they're seeing and they want some questions answered.
But as is often the case with the reform movement, Huffman just shucks and jives concerns of others and lies about the Common Core not taking away curriculum decisions from local schools and local districts.
Not a surprise from a guy who wants to take away the power to accept or reject charter school proposals from the local districts and give it to himself and his fellow central bureaucrats.
He is right that common core is not a curriculum. It is a shuck and jive scheme to reck public education and destroy another democratic institution --- public school education. It is a windfall for corporate profiteers. It is a crappy piece of nonsense designed to diminish the economic prospects of millions of kids by uber-testing and fraudulent expectations that are developmentally and age inappropriate. It is doomed from the getgo to be a fantastic ripoff just like the mortgage backed securities and tranches dumped onto the US taxpayers by dodgy Wall Street banks and shady hedge fund racketeers. Duck taxpayers, when Kevin Huffman's and Michelle Rhee's common core shit hits the fan. Their common core is lubricated with snake oil.
ReplyDeleteThe shrillness with which the Common Core proponents are responding to questions about the CCFS indicates just how threatened they are by the push back.
DeleteThey had dreams of Common Core being shoved through and the tests being put on line and thousands of schools being declared failing with those scores and tens of thousands of teachers getting fired from the evaluations based on the scores.
But instead they're having to defend their curriculum, standards and tests instead.
Kevin Huffman , do what you do best, shuck and jive!
ReplyDeleteI heard the movie Love Story was based on Huffman and Rhee.
DeleteOh, no wait - that was Tipper and Al Gore.
Oh, well.
The corporate profiteers and the billionaire oligarchs are rank with greed. They salivate at the meer talk of profits from their common core shit.
ReplyDeleteArmed with factoids and half-truths in their quivers they lay siege to public schools. They liberate their buildings on behalf of charter school operators. This is their crusade; this is their shared burden; this is their quest! Siege warfare of public education has now reached a most unenlightened climax of idiocy. There is no turning back. We have reached the high water mark of the edu- deform lunacy. Michelle Rhee, Kevin Huffman and their criminally insane ilk are armed with with hedge fund dollars and are marching forward into the abyss. They are lined up at Hellsgate.
"We can't wait!" "We can't wait!" There is too much money to be made. ". From the private musings of Merryl Tisch
Yeah, the meme that "There is no time!" and "We can't wait!" gets repeated by these reformers all the time - from For Profit Geoffrey Canada to Mistress Eva to Uncle Arne to Merry Merryl to John King. And yet, a reasoned argument is, yeah, things need improvement, but we need to approach problems carefully because every problem we try will have its own consequences.
DeleteThese people aren't interested in any of that. Simply bulldozing their way through. And that's because they have a political and economic agenda that is much different than the one they state.
Bravo Maestro!
ReplyDeleteBoycott Pearson, K-12, ALL of Tisch's family businesses, DON'T watch mainstream corporate media, etc., etc...the only thing these animals understand is profits...
ReplyDelete