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*Way* Under The Radar: National K-12 Curriculum Standard Being Mulled

By: Dave Poff (haystack) (Diary)  |  March 11th, 2010 at 12:45 PM  | 

RESIZE: AAA


I’m genuinely conflicted about this news – “Education Panel Unveils Core K-12 Standards”:

Long-standing fears that millions of U.S. students from elementary to high schools aren’t being adequately prepared for college or the workforce and that state standards vary too greatly have spurred a movement for a national core educational curriculum and the release Wednesday of draft standards for English language arts and math.

The release of the draft has been both welcomed and panned, with critics concerned that the standards could lead to a mass-assembly approach to general education or a greater reliance on standardized testing in education. The standards’ creators are now seeking public comment and they’ll probably get plenty.

Conflicted, in part, because it will put control over Public Education Standards in the hands of the Federal Government…I think…and I’m no fan of more Federal intervention in our lives. Having said that, I think our current system has failed our kids at many many levels. What escapes me is whether a “National” standard will be able to improve that situation. I have my doubts.

The cynical side of me worries that this will open the doors to so-called “indoctrination” and leave our kids at the mercy of the prevailing ideology of those in control of the Government (yeah-I went there…today it’s liberalism but at some point that will swing in the other direction). What we want is smart kids that can compete with the other kids around the globe when their time comes to go out into that great big world and motivate, innovate, create…and God forbid..PRO-create.

Here’s the link to the proposed standard. The top page of the site fairly well describes the intent. I should, however, in the interest of “fair and balanced fact sharing” point out the Texas side of this issue:

…the Texas Board of Education is voting and making changes to the curriculum for social studies, which has been adapted by publishers because they want to sell the books to Texas, which is one of the largest consumers of textbooks in the country, hence other states follow their lead.

Texas has routinely set the curriculum standard indirectly because of the numbers of books they have printed for their students. Many other states have had to choose between accepting the Texas standard or paying extra for books tailored to their own custom or unique versions of approved curricula. Typically it is much cheaper to just buy the Texas books than to go it alone. In a National standard (one which Texas and Alaska have thus far opted out of) there would be one set of books for everyone. Bingo! Money saved! Resources pooled!

I *get* the economics of this, and I *get* the upside to a National standard. The larger issue of what’s actually IN those books (and WHO decides what should go in those books) leaves me very troubled.

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  • 10ksnooker

    History and truth comes in versions now … Pick the one that suits.

  • http://barnettlaw.org Frozen_Man

    I doubt that anything good will come from the federal government taking over deciding what my child will be taught. It becomes something else for people in Washing to spend time trying to decide how to dictate and manipulate what my child thinks and the way he acts.

    • http://beaglescout.wordpress.com Beaglescout

      A national curriculum will be a vehicle to propagandize even more than Bill Ayers, Kevin Jennings, Cass Sunstein, Arnie Duncan, and the rest of the communists already do. Defund the Department of Education and return all responsibility for education to the localities. Sure, some will stink. But at least most of them will have much better education than any of them have now. Why? Because someone who lives in the same town doesn’t want the young people in their town to be a bunch of uneducated idiots. That’s too much of a downside. No upside to it.

      • zollistar

        The other problem: it appears that even here, on RedState.com, there is the sense on the part of a few commentators that government — local level, to be sure — can better deliver education than private and eleemosynary efforts.

        Not true!

        It’s very important to get government at all levels out of education. Out! OUT! OUT!!

        • Raven

          I, too, have no doubts. The Feds have gained more and More and MORE control over the education of this nation’s children. They have spent more and More and MORE money on it. And where has the quality gone?

          down. Down. DOWN.

  • revolutionary

    I am in agreement that our education system is failing our kids. The teachers here are so worried about the state testing and student performance that the kids miss out on the real education experience. I have read some of the textbooks my children bring home and they are terrible. Look- history is not always pretty, but we can’t change what happened and it is not our place to try and gloss over the ugly parts. Hopefully, those are the ones we learn from. That said, I also agree in how in the world do we all decide what goes into the textbook? There are so many differnet opinions (and passions) across the country- how would we EVER agree? You can’t really do a state-by-state thing because it might leave out history from other parts of the counrty not accepted by the writers (can you imagine the different versions of the civil war if we had a southern and a northern state writing two different history books?!!) I certainly don’t claim to know the answer, but I worry that my kids aren’t learning the truth about some things. It’s not pretty- our forefathers were scoundrels in their personal lives (to some extent), although brilliant statesmen, but our kids need to know the absolute truth of all of it or we do no one ANY good.

  • erp617

    There should be one, but it should be a broad outline and the feds shouldn’t get anywhere near its development, neither should the teachers unions or their cohorts in teachers’ colleges and departments.

    Who should write it?

    I’d be happy with Thomas Sowell as chairman of a curriculum committee and gladly accept his choices as committee members. There are pre-1960′s curricula available to use as a starting point.

    Oh brave new world where are you? Our kids have been in the wilderness of ignorance for way too long and without that informed citizenry, our country has been led astray.

  • Kyle-MI

    A national curriculum will be controlled by the same liberal education establishment that has slowly been undermining our system of education for the past 40-50 years.

    As for textbooks, I would trust Texas over the federal government any day even though I suspect that even in Texas the liberal education establishment has considerable pull. At least it should be slightly less than CA or NY. The problem with textbooks is that nobody considers the cost-benefit balance. Look at all the benefit we are loosing because our children are receiving a lousy education. You would think in this day and age that someone could publish textbooks that are both cheaper and better. I seriously doubt that the main costs of textbooks are paper, cover and bindings.

  • JadedByPolitics

    BASIC knowledge as they do “social” bullcrap OUR children would be the best in the world as they used to be before liberals DESTROYED our schools!

  • kipling

    The slogan for the new federal system: The Federal Government will do for your local school what it did for the D.C. school system. The Department of Education, lowering the bar since Carter.

  • conservos

    Imagine what they’re doing with healthcare – modeling American healthcare to European Socialized Care and apply that to our education.

    Obama’s getting ready to hijack the education system, if he hasn’t do so already.

    Back in January, riograndevalleygirl got her comment bumped over at Riehl world when she mentioned Perry was rejecting Stimulus 1, partly based on federal control over the school boards.

    http://www.riehlworldview.com/carnivorous_conservative/2010/01/is-this-obamas-pet-goat-moment.html

    This also has to do w/ Obama’s “Race to the Top” grant that virtually every state in the nation has applied for/adopted, sans Texas and Alaska, apparently (Dave’s link)

    http://chattahbox.com/us/2010/03/10/texas-and-alaska-race-to-the-bottom-reject-education-standards/

    I did a little research then and came up w/ the actual wording in the legislation/grant documentation — can’t find it now (thanks computer!) — but it’s all over the web.

    Obama wants the united *states* of America to adopt an international curriculum — what is labed as “international benchmarks” — to make America more “globally competitive.”

    Right.

    He means to dissolute our American identity and sense of nationalism and become “like everyone else.”

    If you think we need to do this to be more competitive in the global marketplace, please think again.

    First, look at who’s at the helm directing this thing. Mr. “Government Take Over 1/6th of America’s Economy, Who Gives a Damn about the $10 Trillion Debt.”

    Second, these would be international benchmarks and standards for the states to adopt, not provide input on. Jake Tapper mentions this:

    http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2010/01/president-calls-to-expand-race-to-the-top.html

    So, who’s curriculum are we adopting?

    Third, there are big groups pushing along these international benchmarks and will continue to do so because they make money off this train. An example:

    Natoinal Center for Education Statistics “Education Indicators: An International Perspective”
    http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/international/intlindicators/

    Education Commission of the States’s “An International Benchmarking Blueprint”
    http://www.ecs.org/html/meetingsEvents/NF2008/resources/ECS-InternationalBenchmarking.pdf

    Fourth, we are behind by about a year. (2009 source)

    http://www.edweek.org/login.html?source=http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2009/01/07/16benchmarks_ep.h28.html&destination=http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2009/01/07/16benchmarks_ep.h28.html&levelId=2100

    Obama is just the perfect catalyst to push this thing through. You can either fight from where you are to ensure defeat, or move to Texas or Alaska and pray for a Perry/Palin ticket in 2012. :)

    And while this may seem disheartening to some (including me), I think this is no worse that what we’re facing w/ hcr.

    Knowledge is power. It’s good we know.

    I hope this is helpful.

    • http://www.hickpolitics.com Dave Poff (haystack)

      .

      • conservos

        thanks, Dave! coming from you, that means a lot.

        Here’s the link to a live broadcast of the 3/11 meeting (mentioned at the end of the Greta article) that will resume after their lunch at 2:30:
        http://www.texasadmin.com/cgi-bin/tea.cgi

        Not sure how the public can provide input, but a link to their main site for you to research:
        http://www.tea.state.tx.us/

        A meeting taking place tomorrow:
        http://www.texasadmin.com/cgi-bin/agenda.cgi?location=tea&savefile=TEA_GM031210

        If you or anyone’s in the Austin area, it would be a good idea to articulate our conservative concerns.

        You don’t have to go and give them this information you’ve learned, but remmeber – he who asks the questions, leads the discussion.

        Ask these blokes:

        What do you know about international benchmarks?

        Why don’t you know? Obama’s proposed them and offered grants to all states.

        Only in other states? But these textbooks will be used in other states who have accepted Obama’s grants and are working on international benchmarks. Explain this, please.

        Are these textbook/this curriclum aligned w/ international benchmarks and standards? But Texas hasn’t adopted these benchmarks. Clarify.

        What are the international benchmarks? Oh? Why don’t you know? Every other state in the nation knows because they’re adopting them!

        Who makes these international benchmarks?

        You’re telling me we’re going to model our education after a foreign nation like China — so we can compete for our own jobs that are being filled by H1B Visa holders here in America? How does this make sense? Why are we working in reverse and adopting someone else’s non-American standards?

        Is American civic study even included in this benchmarks? What about the Constitution? Is that included?

        What about instructing our youth about the federal deficit so that they can learn how to handle the enormous amount of federal debt they will be inheriting when they begin to work to pay off said debt??

        I could go on.

        You can tell I’m upset. Jerks.

        I wish I could go. I would give them an earful.

      • conservos
  • Trelaina

    If so (and I will admit readily I don’t know all the details) he has said a number of times on his show that it is not a government standard….it is a voluntary effort by a number of school systems/state governments across the country. Participation would be voluntary. Sounded to me like it would be more like an accreditation (sp) than a mandatory change.

    That said I would want to hear more details before I said I supported such a thing…and if this has any taint of government involvement….um, NO.

    • Raven

      Was started as voluntary participation. It’s a Very effective technique.

      • Trelaina

        Will keep that in mind as I hear more about this.

  • c17wife

    and an educator by trade, I am genuinely conflicted by this.

    As someone that moved around and the mother of children that have been shuffled like suitcases (as my drama queen 13yo calls her and her siblings) all over the country and beyond, I can see the benefits to a nationalized curriculum. I can even see it to some degree as an educator.

    As children move from one school district to another, perhaps even one in another state, there are often curriculum gaps.

    My oldest experienced it when going from Oklahoma and a half day kindergarten program to Illinois for the first grade with a group of kids that had attended kindergarten all day. She was a bit of a late bloomer anyway and she definitely had to play catch-up for the first couple of months. No thanks to her young, mediocre teacher, we worked with her at home and by the end of the first quarter she was more than caught up with her peers.

    Both of my girls experienced curriculum gaps and had to play catch-up when we left the fine schools of Prattville, AL for private, Christian school in WA. It made for a bit of a scramble the first month or so, but then they were right where they needed to be. The only big issue was my oldest was now in 4th grade and required to write all assignments in cursive, yet hadn’t been taught cursive in AL during third grade. She just had to wing it.

    My son was a good 3-4 months ahead of his peers when we moved from WA to this fine DODDS HIllary school we have here in Germany. In hindsight, I should have moved him on into third grade or homeschooled him that year. Socially though, he needed to be in second grade. Being an active boy and bored out of his mind, he kept his teacher in fits much of the second half of the year. I didn’t have a lot of sympathy for her. Still don’t.

    He is now in 4th grade and we will probably return to WA this summer. I will have to teach him cursive as he will be expected to do his assignments in cursive, yet hasn’t been taught it here in DODDS. I’ll be better prepared this time though.

    As for me, when I moved from Texas to AR the summer between 5th and 6th grade, I should have been moved on into 7th grade. But, being a May baby and at a critical point socially, my mom made me remain in 6th grade which was elementary at the time, instead of going onto 7th grade which was housed in a 7-12 setting. I have NO doubt I was a constant thorn in my teachers’ side all during 6th grade. I was beyond bored!

    That being said, our country really is made up of distinct regions and I don’t necessarily believe that one size truly does fit all. Basics, it can be argued could be standardized somewhat. But given the unbelievable overreach of the teachers unions and our federal government over the past 4 decades, I think we’d only be “dumbing down” our kids by doing this. And honestly, I’d like to keep the federal gov’t as far away as possible from the indoctrination of our kids.

    • http://www.hickpolitics.com Dave Poff (haystack)

      nt

    • mwmom

      but your situation, with so many moves around the country, is much more the exception than the rule for the majority of Americans.

      I believe even if we did have a national curriuculum there would still be major differences in performance from state to state, even district to district. A child at one school could move to another and still be behind or ahead depending on factors such as school district, teachers, and community etc. Therefore I don’t believe the proposed benefits would actually come to fruition and it’s just too darn easy for bureaucrats to add their agendas to the curriuculum. I don’t want someone from either coast deciding what goes in my kids curriculum. Nothing would push me faster to private school than that.

    • Raven

      And if they take the time to look around them at the level of education of their peers when they are in their twenties, they will be thankful for it.

      Those gaps in curricula make us think. We must catch up or skip ahead and find ourselves arguing with teachers because what one tells us in California conflicts with what another tells us in Alaska or North Carolina or Virginia. We learn in a hurry because of this that teacher do Not know everything and if we Want the true answer, we must look it up for ourselves or elsewise divine it using the proper methods, which we learn by trial and error.

      Yes, Ma’am. There are reasons military brats are among the best educated. Good reasons. And they have little to do with going to school on post, because few of us ever do after 6th grade.

  • RedBeard

    This means that parents must insist upon quality education, and that the school board must be responsive to, and controlled by, the parents.

    Now before I get hammered over the sad fact that irresponsible parents are everywhere, and parental involvement in kids’ education is a real problem, let me say that I know. But control of schools by massive bureaucracies from afar only worsens the problem, by giving parents the mistaken idea that the burden is off their shoulders.

    I might have mentioned it here before, but if so it bears repeating, My mother was an honor student at the University of Illinois, Phi Beta Kappa. Her preparation for her college career was in a one-room rural schoolhouse with a stove in the corner and a budget of almost nothing. It was a good school because the parents demanded it, plain and simple. No platoons of clipboard-carrying administrators, no statewide one-size-fits-all testing standards, no federal funding and the accompanying interference, just good teachers and good parents.

    It really is, at its core, a very simple concept.

    • zollistar

      I’m not surprised by the superiority of your mother’s early education. Now the home schooling parents are beginning to show up the educational establishment. Some are beginning to fight back by making it harder for parents to choose the home schooling route.

      True, there is no *perfect* solution, but the idea of the government driving any of this is a perfectly awful idea. Just awful.

      Again, the best answer? Keep government at all levels out of education. Out. OUT! OUT!!

    • Achance

      and teacher’s excuse and like any good lie has a grain of truth in it, but only a grain. The simple fact is that with de-segregation, it quickly became apparent that the majority Black students were far, far behind. The answer has not been to give the Black students the necessary assistance and motivation to achieve but to dumb down the schools and the testing so that the disparities are not so apparent. Throw in a bunch of Leftist multi-culti ideology and you have cesspools posing as schools.

      I went to school in the fifties and sixties in a Jim Crow school in an impoverished farming community in rural Georgia. For many of my classmates in the early grades, school was the only place they had running water and flush toilets; if their parents weren’t illiterate, their grandparents almost certainly were. Your farm animals weren’t safe with some of those boys! But, we had desks in rows, kids in them, and misbehavior, disrespect, and failure simply were NOT tolerated. That’s the difference; those things aren’t just tolerated, they’re celebrated today.

  • NotSoBlueStater

    I’ve always thought it was one area where all might agree on some decent reforms.

    So yes, be suspicious. But realize also that the plight of the real education system that poor and underprivileged people have to deal with is actually one of the few areas Obama can speak from experience on. You can’t be a community organizer without seeing the blight.

    • zollistar

      …have been squeezed out of having any real possibility of helping the children of the underprivileged.

      Here’s the Amazon link to THE BEAUTIFUL TREE: A Personal Journey Into How the World’s Poorest People Are Educating Themselves

      http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=The+Beautiful+tree&x=18&y=19

      It’s written by an educator whose eyes were opened by the efforts of the poorest of the poor throughout the world to escape government schools because of their quality.

    • mwmom

      and then done the opposite. I don’t think they really care about poor kids. If they did they would have allowed the DC voucher program to continue. Those kids had their future taken away from this administration.

      • NotSoBlueStater

        Feels like everything he promises today comes with a YouTube of when he said the exact opposite in the past. So I’ll modify my comment: What he and Sebellius have said in the past about education sounds promising.

        I think the real hope here, though, comes from something that’s simply the reality of our times: Each side can only gore its own oxen. Therefore, only the party in the pocket of the NEA can bring about ed reform. That’s what makes Obama’s earlier comments interesting. They flew in the face of not just Democrat conventional wisdom, but also the donor base.

        • Raven

          And the only way to kill it is with multitudinous wounds.

          Or, as a character in one of my favourite movies put it: “Papercuts. Vicious papercuts.”

  • http://www.scragged.com petrarch

    Think about it for a moment. It’s grossly inefficient for doctor’s offices to have to deal with several different insurance companies, all of which have their own rules and pricing. Wouldn’t it be vastly cheaper, and thus have better service, if we just have one Single-Payer National Health System?

    Eh, NO. Why? Because it is competition that leads to excellence. As long as communications have been sufficient to allow widespread command-and-control, people have been trying to put That One Smart Guy in charge of something that’s fouled up in hopes of fixing it. It has NEVER worked. Not once, anywhere. And it never will, because life is too complicated.

    The only way our education system will ever improve is if power is DEcentralized to the maximum possible degree, ideally to parents via vouchers. What’s the point in vouchers if all the schools teach the exact same curriculum in the exact same way? And we all know that curriculum will be a politically-correct fuzzy-new-math see-and-say Rainbow Coalition paean.

    Personally I don’t think there should be STATE-wide curricula. Each individual school’s administration should have the authority to select what they think is best – and the responsibility to make sure it works, or they lose their jobs because their students go elsewhere. It’s how we do it everywhere else in the economy, why should schooling be any different?

    The moment you accept the argument “well, schooling is an essential service, it needs to follow standards from On High, it’s too important to be left to low-level people to decide on”, you’ve swallowed the liberal kool-aid and we’re right off down the statist road Obama and Co want us on.

    First principles, folks!

    • skorrent1

      Every government standard works against itself.

      “Every loaf of bread must have at least x vit D” means it will have exactly that much and no more.

      “Every bag of flour will have no more than y mouse turds” means you can bet each one has exactly that many.

      “Every hamburger must be cooked to resemble charcoal” means you can’t find a hamburger you would DARE to eat rare.

      Can you imagine what a true national educational standard would look like:
      “Every student should know the alphabet by the third grade, be able to count by fifth grade and write cursive by jr hi.”

      I had a discussion with a GOP candidate for governor whose platform promised “Every student would perform at grade level.” He didn’t seem to understand my insistance that learning ability is nornally distributed.

  • http://freealabamastan.blogspot.com pabarge1

    +1 on the not conflicted thing.

    Color me completely not conflicted. Stop it now. Right now.

  • Ann_W

    to teach reading and thought that letting children choose their own ways to subtract and do long division was a good idea.

    The only way we’re going to seriously improve education is to give parents choice.

  • bigmaude

    You won’t like it but if you look at the communist manifesto, one way they vet as far as they have is one point is to get into the teaching of the children. Karl Marx saw many years ago and is quoted as saying that if we get the mothers out of the home and control the schools, we got ‘em. From the beginning, fathers taught their children sun up to sundown. ONLY when Isreal turned their children over to the Romans did parents relinquish the responsibility of the training of the children. So, what do we expect. You plant beans, you get beans. Bring them home, the children belong to you, not the state!

  • yoyo

    As a nation, I mean. Yup, the 1940-1950′s.

    Our “Greatest Generation” was educated in the 1930′s, when we as a nation were mired in the “Great Depression” and schools were more locally run and centered, with the municipalities setting the standards for education. “Throwing money” at the education system was not an option then.

    The local communities had a vested interest in the proper education of the children, since it was far rarer for any one generation of children to move away. This meant that the children that were being taught today were likely to remain and raise their children in the same community tomorrow.

    The basics were taught. The “three R’s” as it was known. Reading, wRiting, and aRithmatic. My Grandmother used to tell me (and drove this home with me) that NOTHING else was taught or could be taught until those three foundational principles were learned. There was no Basketball, Football, Baseball, or Track and Field without a proficiency in all three R’s, no matter your skill or ability. Science, History or Geography was meaningless unless you could add, read, or write. It was simply not acceptable any other way – by either the school or (especially) the PARENTS.

    And in there lies the rub. We do not have families any longer – a 50%+ divorce rate, combined with single parents with children out of wedlock, coupled with an entitlement mentality….Rosanne Bar said it best on her old TV show “Rosanne”. Paraphrasing: “I have you 2 hours in the evening, but 5 days a week, 9 hours a day, you kids are the Government’s responsibility.”

    Disengaged parents combined with Local/County/State/Federal overlapping and competing interests with funding and beauracracies results in a national average for drop outs somewhere down in the sewers.

    This can be fixed. Lets return to the basics. Lets return to a curriculum that is state of the art. Something “turn of the century”… 20th Century, that is. Something NOT designed by a bunch of Baby Boomers. We have to be smarter than that. Our system needs to be modelled after something that was designed by someone smarter than we are. Someone who educated the baby boomer’s parents…you know, the same parents that will always be known as our “Greatest Generation.”

    We need the system that made THAT generation the greatest. Local schools that are not owned by a federal beauracracy where the failure of our kids is not an option – as dictated by us, the PARENTS.