Limbaugh: The "Common Core" Debacle

by Rush Limbaugh in the Limbaugh Letter, January 2014

"[T]he pushback is coming from, sort of, white suburban moms who, all of a sudden, their child isn't as brilliant as they thought they were and their school isn't quite as good as they thought they were, and that's pretty scary." -- Obama Education Secretary Arne Duncan, dismissing widespread parent complaints about the Regime's national education program known as Common Core, Washington Post, 11/16/13

Of course. Criticizing the latest progressive educational scheme being foisted by Obama on all grade levels in public schools across the nation is ... racist. And scary.

The truth is, it's Common Core that's scary, and the pushback is coming from parents everywhere, who are seeing the awful impact on their kids. A highly unusual letter of protest signed by over 500 New York State principals notes: "[M]any children cried during or after testing, and others vomited or lost control of their bowels or bladders. Others simply gave up. One teacher reported that a student kept banging his head on the desk..."

Such visceral reactions are not the result of tough new educational standards, which we all want. They're the result of interacting with material that makes no damn sense, as you'll see below. The pro-Common-Core talking points sound good: "standards", "academic achievement", "accountability". The reality, as with all things liberal, is just the opposite.

The lefty-Chicago-rooted education philosophy behind the scheme is virulently anti-memorization and anti-fact, with a bizarre obsession with process. It explicitly devalues background knowledge, which is unfairly "privileging", in order to "level the playing field" and "make a profound contribution to equity". Common Core State Standards [CCSS] bring a shocking new level of liberal indoctrination -- already in a classroom near you.

GARBAGE IN

Math

• "Add 26 + 17 by breaking apart numbers to make a ten. Use a number that adds with the 6 in 26 to make a 10. Since 6 + 4 = 10, use 4. Think: 17 = 4 + 13. Add 26 + 4 = 30. Add 30 + 13 = 43. So 26 + 17 = 43." -- third grade CC math assignment, Townhall, 10/4/13
• "'How does Topic C use the array model to move the learning forward?' The question refers to two groups of 48 circles labeled '6 x 8 = 48' and '6 x 8 = (5 + 1) x 8'." -- second grade CC math assignment, Daily Caller, 11/22/13
• "Juanita wants to give bags of stickers to her friends. She wants to give the same number of stickers to each friend. She's not sure if she needs 4 bags or 6 bags of stickers. How many stickers could she buy so there are no stickers left over?" -- CC math question, Twitchy, 12/6/13
• "The question was, if one bridge is 790 feet, and the other is 730 feet, which bridge is longer? [The student] replied that the 790 foot bridge is longer because 790 is greater than 730. This was incorrect, because the child hadn't arrived at the answer through the tortuous path required by the text. [His mother] was furious and quickly educated herself about Obama's Common Core." -- Stanley Kurtz, National Review, 9/25/12
• "Cole's homework tonight. No explanations. Just this." -- parent's screenshot of three Tetris-type shapes, each containing one number, Daily Caller, 11/22/13
• "Take a look at question No. 1, which shows students five pennies, under which it says 'part I know', and then a full coffee cup labeled with a '6' and, under it, the word, 'Whole'. Students are asked to find 'the missing part' from a list of four numbers. My assistant principal for mathematics was not sure what the question was asking. How could pennies be a part of a cup? Then there is Question No. 12. Would (or should) a six-year-old understand the question, 'Which is a related subtraction sentence?' My nephew's wife, who teaches calculus, was stumped by that..." -- Carol Burris, principal, South Side [NY] High School, Washington Post, 10/31/13

Reading

• "[A] talking pineapple challenges a hare to a race. The other animals wager on the immobile pineapple winning -- and ponder whether it's tricking them. When the pineapple fails to move and the rabbit wins, the animals dine on the pineapple. Students were asked two perplexing questions: why did the animals eat the talking fruit, and which animal was wisest?" -- description of eighth grade CC reading exam question, New York Daily News, 4/29/12
• "A President’s job is not easy. A nation's people do not always agree. The President's choices affect everyone. He makes sure the country's laws are fair. Government officials' commands must be obeyed by all. An individual's wants are less important than the nation's well-being." -- third grade CC indoctrination lesson, Daily Caller, 11/22/13
• "Second grade teachers who use the [Common Core] guide take a week to read and digest Harvesting Hope: The Story of Cesar Chavez. The book ... introduce[s] seven- and eight-year olds to what they call the 'Scales of Fairness'. After the kids read the book, they're asked to list the living conditions of the farm workers on one side of the scale. The living conditions of the landowners, or business owners, go on the opposite [side]." -- Education Action Group [EAG], 10/21/13
• "A language-arts [Common Core] lesson plan for third, fourth, and fifth graders has been developed around the book Barack Obama: Son of Promise, Child of Hope, in which the author, Nikki Grimes, paints the 44th President as nothing short of a messianic figure." -- Investor's Business Daily, 12/9/13
• "This [Common Core] guide is for fourth grade teachers, and it contains [a] lesson ... on a book called The Jacket ... The story centers around a young white boy named Phil who wrongly accuses an African American student of stealing his brother.s jacket. It's a fun little book about racism and white privilege..." -- EAG, 10/17/13
• "Teachers and school officials in [Newburgh, NY] have become so appalled by the raunchy content in a Common Core-recommended book that they have refused to distribute the book to ninth grade students ... Black Swan Green by British author David Mitchell ... is written from the perspective of a 13-year-old English boy ... the young narrator vividly describes [sexual activity]." -- Daily Caller, 11/1/13
• "[Toni Morrison's] The Bluest Eye is the story of Pecola Breedlove, a young black girl ... [R]aped by her father and beaten by her mother, she finally appeals to Soaphead Church, a pedophile, to help her attain blue eyes. After being impregnated by her father, she loses her baby and ultimately loses her mind." -- Macey France, CC "exemplar" book list for 11th graders, PolitiChicks, 8/3/13

History

• "Students in some Albany [NY] High School English classes were asked ... as part of a persuasive writing assignment to make an abhorrent argument: 'You must argue that Jews are evil, and use solid rationale from government propaganda to convince me of your loyalty to the Third Reich!' Students were asked to watch and read Nazi propaganda, then pretend their teacher was a Nazi government official who needed to be convinced of their loyalty. In five paragraphs, they were required to prove that Jews were the source of Germany's problems ... Albany Superintendent Marguerite Vanden Wyngaard said ... the exercise reflects the type of writing expected of students under the new Common Core." -- Times Union, 4/12/13
• "A student in Bryant School District in Arkansas brought home a worksheet that presented her with a scenario that referred to the Bill of Rights as 'outdated' and that as part of a special committee she would need to throw out two of the Amendments. The worksheet was handed out to sixth grade students ... she has not received any government or civics classes and this was the first assignment dealing with the Constitution or Bill of Rights. The school district is participating in the embattled Common Core curriculum." -- Digital Journal, 10/5/13
• "Refrain from giving background context or substantial instructional guidance at the outset ... This close reading approach forces students to rely exclusively on the text instead of privileging background knowledge, and levels the playing field for all students as they seek to comprehend Lincoln's address." -- CC instruction to teachers to teach the Gettysburg Address without mentioning the Civil War or the Battle of Gettysburg, Washington Post, 11/19/13
• "Is there such a thing as a 'good war'? Explain." — Teacher's Edition of CC-aligned "The American Experience" on World War II. No explanation is offered why America entered the war. There's no discussion of Pearl Harbor, the Holocaust, or the bombing of Britain. The book contains no speech of Winston Churchill or FDR, as per Terrence Moore in "A Textbook That Should Live in Infamy: The Common Core Assaults World War II", Townhall, 12/2/13

• "The reality is implementation at the state level is just a disaster." -- Tom Phillips, Watkins Glen [NY] school district superintendent, "Common Core Fix for Schools Has Broken Parts", Ithaca Journal, 11/8/13
• "In some places [already using CC], such as New York and Minnesota, the shift to Common Core testing produced a steep drop in student scores..." -- AP, 12/2/13
• The talking pineapple question (see above) was designed by Pearson, a testing company awarded a $32 million contract by New York State to overhaul the state exams. Some 30 test questions were marked invalid because they were nonsensical or contained misspellings and errors. -- NY1 News, 5/10/12
• "[C]ommon Core ... elevates soft skills like global awareness, media literacy, cross-cultural flexibility and adaptability, and creativity to equal footing with academic content. This less academic approach has, in fact, been road tested in places like Connecticut and West Virginia. Predictably, the results have been dismal." -- Weekly Standard, 5/29/13
• "National [CC] mathematics standards ... that supporters say are designed to make high school graduates 'college- and career-ready' and improve the critical science, technology, engineering, and math [stem] pipeline do not prepare students to study stem or even be admitted to a selective four-year college, according to a new study..." -- Pioneer Institute, 10/1/13
• "The foundational philosophy of Common Core is to create students ready for social action ... Nationalizing education via Common Core is about promoting an agenda of anti-capitalism, sustainability, white guilt, global citizenship, self-esteem, affective math, and culture sensitive spelling and language. This is done in the name of consciousness raising, moral relativity, fairness, diversity, and multiculturalism." -- Dean Kalahar, American Thinker, 4/12/13
• "The impact on English classrooms in Massachusetts, which adopted Common Core in 2010, has been to reduce the amount of classical literature studied by more than half. Goodbye Charles Dickens, Edith Wharton, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn." -- Jamie Gass and Jim Stergios, Weekly Standard, 5/29/13
• "...Stanford University emeritus professor of mathematics James Milgram, the only academic mathematician on Common Core's validation committee ... refused to sign off on the final draft of the national standards. He describes the standards as having 'extremely serious failings', reflecting 'very low expectations', and ultimately leaving American students one year behind their international peers by fifth grade and two years behind by seventh grade." -- Weekly Standard, 5/29/13

Stupid. Confusing. Destructive. A privacy nightmare. No wonder Common Core has been dubbed "ObamaCore".