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Common Core ‘Exemplars’: Graphic Sex and Praising Castro

I must admit that I would have been too embarrassed to teach Julia Alvarez’s sexually explicit novel, In the Time of the Butterflies, to the college students I have taught for over twenty years, much less to ninth- and tenth-graders, as many Georgia high school teachers have been instructed to do.

Some high school teachers also have a problem with its overtly feminist and leftist-leaning ideology. The men are portrayed as weak drunkards, continually cheating on their wives.

For example, there is a drunken New Year’s celebration of “the triumphant announcement.  Batista had fled!  Fidel, his brother Raul, and Ernesto they call Che had entered Havana and liberated the country.” No indication in the novel that Fidel and Raul turned out to be tyrants, or Che a mass murderer.

The novel has explicit descriptions of masturbation and intercourse, but I’m too embarrassed to quote those.

The novel is taken straight from Common Core’s “Text Exemplars” for ninth and tenth grades.  Although the “exemplars” are officially intended to be suggested readings, educrats take the suggestions literally.  They know that they have to prepare students for the national tests being rolled out in 2014/2015.

Most state legislators and members of the school board who support Governor Nathan Deal in his support of Common Core repeat that Common Core does not prescribe a curriculum—but rather “standards.”  These standards supposedly ensure that students’ academic achievement is consistent state to state.  But that’s another reason for textbook selection committees to select works from the “exemplars”—like Alvarez’s novel.  And it’s another reason why school boards seek to buy “Common Core-compliant”textbooks, as Cobb County in Georgia was going to do for $7.5 million—until citizens protested.

Consistency and standards are among the selling points of Common Core.  Recently at a political meeting one of our Republican state senators brought in a Common Core-supporting member of the state school board to sell us on Common Core and explain that arguments against Common Core are based on misinformation.  These are state standards, he insisted.  They are not curricula.  And they were developed by some “very smart” people–people with doctorates in education and experience in administration.  The school board member even used his son’s Boy Scout badges to demonstrate the difference between standards and curricula.  Neither he nor the senator had spent a day in a classroom as teachers, however. Had they, they would have known that “standards” and “curricula” in the real world of the classroom have very little difference in meaning.  That’s why there is a big rush on to buy “Common Core-compliant” textbooks across the country.

Still, these two Common Core salesmen implied that opponents are part of the tin foil hat contingent.  Even my question in private to the school board member (who claimed to love “literature”) about the fact that informational texts like EPA directives will be replacing a large percentage of literary works was met with the retort, “So how many times do you use Beowulf?  Graduates need to learn how to read informational texts in order to be able to read instructions at work.”

No doubt, high school students sharing his opinion would rather read Alvarez’s unchallenging polemical and titillating prose than Beowulf or Paradise Lost.   No doubt, her novel will bring them up to speed on politically correct figures and sex tips.  The accompanying EPA directives will teach them how to scan boring texts for required instructions at their “21^st century” jobs where they will do tasks that require little concentration or independent thought.

And as national social studies standards now come rolling in they will also learn about new American heroes, like Common Core’s biggest funder, billionaire Bill Gates.  One elementary school textbook published by Pearson, the giant international publishing company that has helped develop Common Core tests, contains several pages of tribute to him.

The tribute to the billionaire leftist will make a nice complement to praise of Castro and Che in one of the few works of fiction allowed to remain in the ever-diminishing pool of literary “exemplars” under these new “standards.”

Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.

Enrichment Elementary Math Problem or a Mistake in the new de facto elementary patchwork textbook?

63 divided by X = 7 remainder 1

answer: x = 8.87323943661 (this might be a little advanced for 4th graders!)

Or does it mean:
63 divided by X = 7
x = 9

Or does it mean:
64 divided by X = 7 remainder 1
x = 9

Clearly – the answer and the question, for that matter, are NOT clear!

The district continues to instill confidence in its ability to seamlessly implement a new “self written” curriculum!

Indiana has become the first state to retreat from the Common Core standards, as Governor Mike Pence has just signed a bill suspending their implementation.

September 18, 2012

Young, Gifted and Neglected

By CHESTER E. FINN Jr.

Washington

BARACK OBAMA and Mitt Romney both attended elite private high schools. {so do Obama’s daughters} Both are undeniably smart and well educated and owe much of their success to the strong foundation laid by excellent schools.  

Every motivated, high-potential young American deserves a similar opportunity. But the majority of very smart kids lack the wherewithal to enroll in rigorous private schools. They depend on public education to prepare them for life. Yet that system is failing to create enough opportunities for hundreds of thousands of these high-potential girls and boys.

Mostly, the system ignores them, with policies and budget priorities that concentrate on raising the floor under low-achieving students. A good and necessary thing to do, yes, but we’ve failed to raise the ceiling for those already well above the floor.

Public education’s neglect of high-ability students doesn’t just deny individuals opportunities they deserve. It also imperils the country’s future supply of scientists, inventors and entrepreneurs.

Today’s systemic failure takes three forms.

First, we’re weak at identifying “gifted and talented” children early, particularly if they’re poor or members of minority groups or don’t have savvy, pushy parents.

Second, at the primary and middle-school levels, we don’t have enough gifted-education classrooms (with suitable teachers and curriculums) to serve even the existing demand. Congress has “zero-funded” the Jacob K. Javits Gifted and Talented Students Education Program, Washington’s sole effort to encourage such education. Faced with budget crunches and federal pressure to turn around awful schools, many districts are cutting their advanced classes as well as art and music.

Third, many high schools have just a smattering of honors or Advanced Placement classes, sometimes populated by kids who are bright but not truly prepared to succeed in them.

Here and there, however, entire public schools focus exclusively on high-ability, highly motivated students. Some are nationally famous (Boston Latin, Bronx Science), others known mainly in their own communities (Cincinnati’s Walnut Hills, Austin’s Liberal Arts and Science Academy). When my colleague Jessica A. Hockett and I went searching for schools like these to study, we discovered that no one had ever fully mapped this terrain.

In a country with more than 20,000 public high schools, we found just 165 of these schools, known as exam schools. They educate about 1 percent of students. Nineteen states have none. Only three big cities have more than five such schools (Los Angeles has zero). Almost all have far more qualified applicants than they can accommodate. Hence they practice very selective admission, turning away thousands of students who could benefit from what they have to offer. Northern Virginia’s acclaimed Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, for example, gets some 3,300 applicants a year — two-thirds of them academically qualified — for 480 places.

We built a list, surveyed the principals and visited 11 schools. We learned a lot. While the schools differ in many ways, their course offerings resemble A.P. classes in content and rigor; they have stellar college placement; and the best of them expose their pupils to independent study, challenging internships and individual research projects.

Critics call them elitist, but we found the opposite. These are great schools accessible to families who can’t afford private schooling or expensive suburbs. While exam schools in some cities don’t come close to reflecting the demographics around them, across the country the low-income enrollment in these schools parallels the high school population as a whole. African-American youngsters are “overrepresented” in them and Asian-Americans staggeringly so (21 percent versus 5 percent in high schools overall). Latinos are underrepresented, but so are whites.

That’s not so surprising. Prosperous, educated parents can access multiple options for their able daughters and sons. Elite private schools are still out there. So are New Trier, Scarsdale and Beverly Hills. The schools we studied, by and large, are educational oases for families with smart kids but few alternatives.

They’re safe havens, too — schools where everyone focuses on teaching and learning, not maintaining order. They have sports teams, but their orchestras are better. Yes, some have had to crack down on cheating, but in these schools it’s O.K. to be a nerd. You’re surrounded by kids like you — some smarter than you — and taught by capable teachers who welcome the challenge, teachers more apt to have Ph.D.’s or experience at the college level than high school instructors elsewhere. You aren’t searched for weapons at the door. And you’re pretty sure to graduate and go on to a good college.

Many more students could benefit from schools like these — and the numbers would multiply if our education system did right by such students in the early grades. But that will happen only when we acknowledge that leaving no child behind means paying as much attention to those who’ve mastered the basics — and have the capacity and motivation for much more — as we do to those who cannot yet read or subtract.

It’s time to end the bias against gifted and talented education and quit assuming that every school must be all things to all students, a simplistic formula that ends up neglecting all sorts of girls and boys, many of them poor and minority, who would benefit more from specialized public schools. America should have a thousand or more high schools for able students, not 165, and elementary and middle schools that spot and prepare their future pupils.

With their support for school choice, Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama have both edged toward recognizing that kids aren’t all the same and schools shouldn’t be, either. Yet fear of seeming elitist will most likely keep them from proposing more exam schools. Which is ironic and sad, considering where they went to school. Smart kids shouldn’t have to go to private schools or get turned away from Bronx Science or Thomas Jefferson simply because there’s no room for them.

Chester E. Finn Jr., the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, is the author, with Jessica A. Hockett, of “Exam Schools: Inside America’s Most Selective Public High Schools.”

The Common Core standards are not a panacea; much depends on the curricula that states and districts select to implement them. Some critics suggest that we are enshrining mediocre standards for eternity.

But the Common Core standards are a floor, not a ceiling. Students can still be accelerated and offered supplemental learning, the standards can be improved over time, and states are free to devise something better.

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