Common Core Kindergarten Homework

Via @ The Chalk Face, here is a piece of Common Core homework brought to you by Pearson:

Kindergarten homework?

What the hell happened to afterschool play?

@ The Chalk Face describes how one little boy reacts to his Pearson work:

Sara Wottawa is a parent in New York who is highly conscientious of her kids’ school work and progress.  Today, she posted the following on Facebook:

Today I am very emotional and upset. My son, who is in kindergarten, is very cooperative in school but when he comes home he emotionally falls apart. Today after trying to assist him with his developmentally inappropriate homework I reached my breaking point. I decided for the remainder of the year he will no longer take part in completing developmentally inappropriate homework.

What damage is being done to this generation of children by the Best and Brightest who have brought us the untested, unpiloted, developmentally inappropriate Common Core Federal Standards?

As we saw last month, the Common Core work is already driving up the anxiety level of kindergarteners by giving them work they are not ready for (and shouldn't be ready for!)

These standards have been rammed through by the oligarchy to try and show the peons how "stupid" our children are, how "failing" our schools are, how "we" are at fault for the economy because we and our kids are just not smart enough to handle the work needed for the 21st century economy, why "we" are the reason why the American Experiment in democracy is failing.

None of this is true, of course.

Our children are NOT stupid, our schools are NOT failing, we are NOT at fault for the economy collapse, we are NOT at fault for the failures of government and the political classes.

The problems the country is facing quite simply come from the oligarchy looking to steal every bit of wealth in this country and leave nothing for the rest of us.

They're scapegoating the working and middle classes ("You're not working hard enough to succeed in the 21st Century economy"), they're blaming the school system ("Children are not receiving the 21st Century skills they need to succeed in the global economy"), they're promoting education reform and Common Core and school choice as the solution for these problems.

But they're the ones causing all of the income inequality and poverty with their economic policies and tax policies meant to distribute ALL of the wealth upward.

Of course education reform, Common Core, and school choice are not meant to solve the problems of income inequality, poverty and the like.

They are meant to be used as a bludgeon against what little is left of the Liberal Project as the Shock Doctrinaires strip every bit of the "public" and the "commons" from American life, privatize every public institution in sight, and gobble up all the wealth (NOTE: Dow at all time high - unemployment, income stagnation, social mobility remain HUGE problems for all but the 1%.)

The American Experiment is coming to an end.  We are now fully in the American Empire where the powers that be subvert democracy by spending billions to buy the offices they want (see here), where the powers that be ram through education programs that are meant to further exacerbate the problems (NOTE: Not one oligarch is sending his/her kid to a school run under the education reforms the oligarchs are pushing for other people's kids), where they steal all the money and get government bailouts and run up the government debt and then blame us for the problem and look to cut what little is left of the social safety net as the solution.

It's a rough time to be a kid here in America.

It's a rough time to be a teacher.

With labor leaders like Randi Weingarten and Michael Mulgrew supporting the oligarchy in their attempts to destroy the working and middle classes, to implement a privatization program for schools, and to bust the unions and break what little power is left with working people, the future looks quite dim.

But the resistance to Common Core and reform and privatization is growing.

They've got the money and the media.

But the resistance has the numbers.

99%, in fact.

Time to use that against the oligarchy.

We can start by boycotting the Pearson kindergarten homework.

A Matter Of Context

Horrific:

AURORA, Colo. — A gunman wearing a gas mask set off an unknown gas and fired into a crowded movie theater in suburban Denver at a midnight opening of the Batman movie “The Dark Knight Rises,” killing 12 people and injuring at least 50 others, authorities said.

Moviegoers didn’t know what was happening and some thought the attack was part of the show. Then they saw a silhouette of a person in the smoke at the front of the theater near the screen, pointing a gun at the crowd.

“I told my friend ‘we’ve got to get out of here,’ but then he shot people trying to go out the exits,” Jennifer Seeger told NBC’s “Today.” She said the shooter made his way up the aisle, firing as he went, saying nothing.

Some of those injured are children, including a 3-month-old infant who was shot.

...

Victims are being treated for chemical exposure apparently related to canisters thrown by the gunman. The shooter, a man in his 20s, was arrested shortly after the attack at 12:30 a.m. MDT at the multiplex theater at a mall in Aurora.

FBI spokesman Jason Pack said there’s no indication so far of any connection to terror groups.

It was the worst mass shooting in Colorado since the Columbine High School massacre on April 20, 1999. Students Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17, opened fire at the school in the Denver suburb of Littleton, about 15 miles west of Aurora, killing 12 classmates and a teacher and wounding 26 others before killing themselves in the school’s library.

Just like a video game or Batman movie.

Or life in any number of countries we're "freeing" from terrorism - like Afghanistan, Iraq, Somali, Yemen, etc.

Barack Obama says he is "shocked" by this horror.

Why?

Every week he kills as many or even more innocent people as this 24 year old Denver murderer did last night.

Isn't dropping death from the skies onto innocent people from a remote location as horrific and evil as what happened in the Aurora theater?

Isn't targeting people for assassination who have never been charged with crimes, let alone convicted of them, and carrying those assassinations out in secret as horrific and evil as what happened in the Aurora theater?

Might there even be a connection between a country whose foreign policy involves slaughtering innocents in the name of "freedom" and a domestic homeland where an overarmed populace fed on a steady diet of media and government lies, force-fed fear and anger by the corporate state in order to increase sales, and fighting it out for an ever-diminishing pool of jobs and resources gets horrifically violent?

I bet there is.

But the good news is, if this murderer were to just join the American armed forces and head to a foreign country armed and ready to kill in the name of "freedom", his murderous instincts could be put to good use.

You see, if this 24 year had simply killed 12 alleged "terrorists" overseas or dropped a drone bomb on a Pakistani wedding party from some remote Colorado location, they'd have given him a medal.

He'd have been cheered on Morning Joe.

It's all a matter of context.

And therein lies the core rot in modern America.

The evil and horrors that we perpetrate as a nation every day in our foreign policy in the non-ending War on Terrorism only become horrific and evil to us when we see them perpetrated on innocents here at home.

Money For Empire, Schools For Free

I haven't dug into the Wikileaks story yet, but the Guardian is reporting it this way:

The United States was catapulted into a worldwide diplomatic crisis today, with the leaking to the Guardian and other international media of more than 250,000 classified cables from its embassies, many sent as recently as February this year.

At the start of a series of daily extracts from the US embassy cables – many designated "secret" – the Guardian can disclose that Arab leaders are privately urging an air strike on Iran and that US officials have been instructed to spy on the UN leadership.

These two revelations alone would be likely to reverberate around the world. But the secret dispatches, which were obtained by WikiLeaks, the whistleblowers' website, also reveal Washington's evaluation of many other highly sensitive international issues.

These include a shift in relations between China and North Korea, high-level concerns over Pakistan's growing instability, and details of clandestine US efforts to combat al-Qaida in Yemen.

Sounds like fun Sunday night reading!

I have two comments here before signing off for the night:

A) If the Change We Can Believe In guy won, how come we still engage in cowboy shit all around the world?

B) We spend all this money on Empire, we spend little on important things here at home - you know, maybe Arne Duncan wouldn't have to cheerlead class sizes of 50 if we spent just a little less on our world empire (which is crumbling and only benefits Microsoft, Monsanto, Big Pharma, the financial industries and the war industries anyway.)

Just saying.