Common Core Opponents Not "Drunk With Hysteria"

The attempt to marginalize Common Core opponents and critics continues unabated these days, with newspaper editorial boards like the one at the Daily News accusing people who are against the Core of being "drunk with hysteria."

A New Yorker writes a letter in respone to the Daily News to let them know why they are off base in their attacks:

We, the people, who are against the Common Core are not “drunk with right wing hysteria,” as the Daily News says (“Stand strong on the Core,” editorial, March 12).

We wish it was voluntary, not mandated. We wish educators and parents had been involved with its implementation, not trade organizations and corporations. We wish that states hadn’t been coerced into accepting the standards by the feds dangling Race to the Top funds in exchange for its implementation. We wish the standards had been field-tested first, instead of having our children treated as guinea pigs for Pearson and Microsoft. We wish for transparency.

Do you really believe children struggling in school now will do better with these new standards? If they still live in poverty with minimal parent involvement, nothing will change. In fact, their chances of graduating will go down if the standards are that much more vigorous.

Fix the real problems before changing a whole system that wasn’t broken.

The lack of transparency, the coercion to adopt the Core through a mix of stick and carrot, the deceit of how this was a "state-led initiative" when it really was a plutocrat-funded initiative that paid off the governors to push through these standards, the shoving of all of these untested changes onto the system all at once, the stripping of humanity from the ELA standards and replacing it with rote/follow the directions skills - these are just some of the issues that I have with the CCSS.

These do not derive from hysteria or inebriation, no matter what the functionaries for the plutocracy at the Daily News say in their editorials.

They are real concerns and they are part of the reason why Americans all over this country are beginning to rise up against the Common Core and the education reform agenda as developed by plutocrats like Bill Gates and as imposed via carrot and stick by Washington.