The Common Core Agenda: Failure By Design

Contemporary Insurgent

By Michael Bohr, CI

-----------------------
The Common Core Agenda of raising standards in the quest to attain workers with "21st Century Skills" and to be "College and Career Ready" is fundamentally flawed in a myriad of ways.
Assuming that those entities, (such as the business organizations, corporations, academia and political leaders who make the claim that our children do not have the knowledge and skills needed to enter today's world of college and career) are correct and that our children are not ready, but the system they have installed to remedy this shortfall is creating severe psychological damage to children, while failing to reach the purported goals of "College and Career Readiness", then we must take a different course of action.

The primary problems related to the common core system are thus:

1)The level to which the bar has been raised for children to achieve success is out of reach
2)the tools and lessons provided to reach the bar are both inadequate and convoluted
The demands insisted upon for children to be college and career ready require what is the equivalent of 2-4 years of ADDITIONAL traditional education (as 100+ years of research has deemed age and developmentally appropriate) be crammed into the current preK-12 system.

This is essentially the same as asking a 2yo to run like a 4 yo and a newborn to walk like a 2 yo!
It doesn't work and it harms the child psychologically and physiologically.
If it is true that the 21st century requires our children to be educated more, then we, and they, need more time. Also, it must be factored in that not all 21st jobs will have this demand, as many "blue collar" and service industry jobs will remain the same as they are today well into the 21st century and beyond and so not all children will need this additional academic training.
Our Education system did not start out as preK-12. It starts out as K-3/4 and as technology and society advanced and more

Knowledge and skills were required, more grades were added. Hence, the names we know today: Elementary School, Intermediate School, High School and then the degrees of
College and Universities Assoc degree, BA, Masters, PhD, etc,...
That common sense, time tested approach to increasing the skills and knowledge of the people within an advancing society has been utterly abandoned with the introduction of the Common Core and its draconian approach to forcing children to behave, react and learn like adults and there needs to be a return to the child centric, not corporate centric, approach to educating the children of this nation.

If college has become so difficult that a traditional education does not equip our children to handle it, then it is a problem at the collegiate level that needs to be addressed, not at the preK-12 level.
If the job market has become so complex that the traditional preK-12 education is inadequate, then it is still at the collegiate level, where they are both demanding too much too soon and subsequently failing to educate properly, that the problem lies!

In a nutshell, what we have here are ADULTS from the political, corporate and collegiate worlds failing to accept responsibility for their shortcomings and then blaming and punishing children, parents and preK-12 educators for it and demanding we pay for the training that their workers need.
This needs to end because if we continue on the path laid out by the Common Core Agenda, they still will not get the workers they need and our children will be damaged goods destined for a life time of failure and poverty... And our country will implode!
-Michael Bohr, Contemporary Insurgent

---------------------------------------

MEME REPORT:
MISSOURI STUDENTS DON'T WANT DIVERSITY

 

Dershowitz: Obama is a failure by his own standards

“I think this will be his legacy in terms of international relations and I think it will result in an increase in the nuclear arms race, an end to anti-nuclear proliferation, an increase in the likelihood of war, and a greater gulf between Israel and the United States. All of which he promised would not happen..............If you judge president Obama by his own standards, he is an abject failure when it comes to international relations. Forget about my standard or yours. By his own standard he is an abject failure when it comes to dealing with Iran.” --Alan Dershowitz 08.05.15 [The Observer]

Freedom of dissent on many university campuses is quickly becoming an endangered species.

In a recent column, Alan Dershowitz wrote:

• Freedom of dissent on many university campuses is quickly becoming an endangered species. Many constituent groups support free speech "for me but not for thee." Ideas that they express come within the ambit of free expression, but opposing ideas that make them feel unsafe are now included in the amorphous category of "harassment."
  
  The real world into which students graduate is not always a safe place. Students must be prepared to face the cruel realities of obnoxious views that make them feel uncomfortable and unsafe. Sexism, racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and other awful "isms" still exist in many parts of our own country and in the world. We have the right to try to defeat these pernicious and dangerous ideas in the marketplace. But we cannot censor them in the real world. Nor should we try to protect our students from them as they prepare to enter that world. Instead, members of the university community must learn the best ways to respond to ideas they detest within the framework of a free and open marketplace.

It's Now Been 8 Days Since Mob Rule Became the Law in Baltimore, Maryland

 On the event of  Maryland's State Attorney Marilyn Mosby's levying charges  against the 6 Baltimore offices, Alan Dershowitz had this to say about it: 

"This is a very sad day for justice . . . Today had nothing to do with justice. Today was crowd control. Everything was motivated by a threat of riots and a desire to prevent riots............The mayor outrageously said we're going to get justice for the victim, the family and people of Baltimore, never mentioning the defendants. Under our Constitution, the only people who are entitled to justice are the defendants.........They are presumed innocent, they need due process of law, and the mayor and the state attorney have made it virtually impossible for these defendants to get a fair trial. They have been presumed guilty." --Civil Rights Attorney Alan Dershwitz 05.02.15

For the sake of common sense, I hope Dershowitz is right. Just the fact that when Mosby made her announcement, she told the press that Freddy Gray's death was in fact a homicide and that the 6 named officers were involved in the killing. She made no indication she was charging them with homicide, but rather that they were in fact played a part in the homicide. The officers hadn't even been arraigned yet.

Sheriff David Clarke put it into perspective for me when he described it as: "Baltimore cops ‘offered up as human sacrifices’ to ‘an angry mob." Not that anyone involved in the Baltimore case has any level of divinity, I instantly thought of  Pilate asking the mob whether to release Barabbas or Jesus. Even though Jesus was the only one of the two who had not committed a crime, the crowd chose Barrabas. Why? Because many knew him so they felt like he was one of their own. It doesn't seem like an unbelievable event any more in light of the events in Baltimore.

The mob burned and looted a city, the mayor encouraged it, and in return they got the charges against the officers. When a curfew was put in place, the protesters, for the most part, ignored it. The violence slowly subsided. Then Mosby announced her decision without spending much time even looking at the case after she received it. The mob then turned into celebration. Isn't that a good thing? Depends on how you look at it. The mob is still exhibiting their control over the city. And if Dershowitz is right...if there is an acquittal or a not guilty verdict then Baltimore is likely to be burned to the ground.