Monthly Archives: July 2013

News

Event: Picket the State Board Meeting

3 Comments

When Carie Valentine, a mother against Common Core, secured the proper permit yesterday to have a peaceful demonstration against Common Core this coming Friday, she also called the Salt Lake Police to let them know about the event.

The officer on the other end of the line told her that he was thrilled that Utahns are not backing down and asked her to continue the fight, saying that he spoke for many in his office.

Wow.

So, this Friday, outside the State School Board’s monthly, all-day meeting, Utah teachers, parents and citizens will demonstrate against Common Core. The peaceful demonstration has been organized for many reasons.

1. Normally, the public may only speak at USSB meetings if a request is made ahead of time, and only two minutes are given per person, with a firm limit on numbers allowed to speak.

2. There is a long history with most of the members of this board, that demonstrates a refusal do adequate research about the experiment called Common Core or to acknowledge that there are terrible, sobering academic flaws, and even unconstitutional flaws, in the new agenda. The board tends to use talking points rather than evidence or references, such as pilot studies, references to laws, or empirical data, to make their parroted claims that the Common Core system is legitimate. Many citizens feel that this atmosphere of no debate is an anti-intellectual, un-American stance.

3. There are numerous, serious concerns about the 518-page agenda to be addressed in the meeting, (including a tax-funded propaganda campaign to push common core acceptance on schools, media and parents).

4. The board did not provide a thorough public and media vetting of the transformative changes to our children’s educational experience prior to implementation; and Common Core cannot be amended without Utah asking permission from unelected D.C. groups who copyrighted the standards Utah uses. Local control has thus been opted away by the board.

Many who would stand up and protest can not do so; they have to be at jobs at 8:30 on a Friday morning; or they are children, who don’t have a voice to articulate their displeasure with the Common Core situtation; or they are principals, staff and teachers whose jobs depend on them appearing to agree with Common Core’s implementation in Utah.

Keeping that in mind, if you can make it, please come. Know that you likely represent thousands who cannot join us Friday.

———————————————-
Where:

Utah State Office of Education
250 East 500 South
Salt Lake City, Utah, 84114

When: beginning 8:30 a.m. this Friday, August 2.

Who: All are welcome.
————————————————-

From Carie Valentine, event organizer:

“…[W]hen I found out about Common Core I was upset and even angry that our state would make such radical and damaging changes to our education system. Since that time, many good parents just like you have worked tirelessly to get the word out about Common Core. Parents are not being educated by our own state school board and so we have had to educate ourselves.

The rally at the capitol was amazing. The [many hundreds of] people that showed up to voice their opposition was inspiring. I would like to continue that momentum and demonstrate in front of the state education offices. Their last meeting before the traditional school schedule begins is this Friday, Aug 2. Please join me to send them a message that we are in this for the long haul.

I have secured the proper permit for a demonstration this Friday at the State School Board Offices in Salt Lake City. This is considered a spontaneous demonstration.

…I have also called the SLC police dept. and they know we are coming and the officer I spoke with was thrilled we aren’t backing down. He asked us to continue the fight and said he spoke for many in his office.

If you have access to a bigger bank of people, please pass the word along. These are our children, our tax dollars, and our schools. You have my permission to give out my email address to others who want to come. Please try and make time. We are all busy but this is important.

This is a chance to let them know we are not going away. If you are coming, plan on attending the public comment period from 8-8:30 and the picketing will be from 8:30am-9:30am. Please make your own sign and if you have an button wear that. Here are the “rules”.
We can’t block the sidewalk or the entrance to the building. We can’t (shouldn’t) swear or yell through bull horns. We can hold signs and chant something clever about “no common core”. We can’t prevent movement of pedestrians on the sidewalk. Please email me your confirmation so I can have an idea of how many of us there will be.

If you would like to speak to the board directly the public comment period will be from 8-8:30.

You must sign up in advance. I tried attending and signing up at the meeting and they took the sign up away before I could put my name on it.

To sign up to speak at the board meeting in advance, contact Board Secretary Lorraine Austin at (801) 538-7517.

To picket outside, there is no need to sign up in advance, but if you want to give us a head count, email Carie Valentine at carie.valentine.2@q.com

Concerns

Physics Teacher Shares Concerns about Common Core

37 Comments

I received the letter below from a teacher who wanted to share his concerns about Common Core.

*******************

My name is Stuart Harper, I am a first year high school physics teacher in St. George. I have a deep love and passion for teaching, not teaching for teaching’s sake, but actually giving meaningful education. I have only recently been introduced to common core (my first encounter with it was about two years ago) and I am gravely concerned by it. The things that concern me the most about it are: 1) the way it is presented and pushed upon us in our teacher training programs (even at BYU), 2) the lack of control we have over its content, 3) the awful quality of its math core, 4) the over-emphasis on testing, 5) the massive burdens on schools for curriculum changes and data collection, and 6) how its focus drives schools deeper into the political realm and further from real education.

Now before I dive into my points I want to address something that I had to learn from experience. Many people say “well this is just the core, you have as much freedom as you want to teach what you want.” (If I hear that overused apple analogy any more I am going to scream.) I have found that in the field that this is not true. Teachers, under pressure by superiors in government positions to perform or else, are driven more and more to teach just the core. I have seen many teachers do this, and it saddens me. I look at my own core, physics, which currently hasn’t been hit yet by common core though it is coming soon, and I see so much great physics that I would never dream of leaving out. But I have talked with a few teachers here in Utah that have confessed that they teach only the core. So anyone that tries to diminish the importance of the issue by saying the teachers have all the freedom they need to teach what they want must be unaware or totally numb to the suffocating constriction of these government restrictions.

The first time I was introduced to common core was at BYU. I was taking a class on classroom management from the Mckay School of education. The teacher, an adjunct faculty from an adjacent district, told us about this new “common core” and how it would help so many people. The thing I still remember her saying was “And we really need you to be on board with this. We are really counting on the new wave of teachers to help push this through.” I didn’t think it was too odd, simply because I did not yet know what it was. When I did about a semester later, I started vocalizing my concerns in my education classes. One of my teachers brushed aside my concerns in front of the whole class saying that it was inevitable, “that Utah will kick against the pricks but when the money starts calling it will fall right in place.” I was abashed by that. It took a long time to even convince my sister (an elementary ed major) of its flaws due to the indoctrination of some of BYU’s instructors. (Please understand, I love BYU. Their Physics Education program from the college of physical and mathematical sciences is the best in the nation for a reason, but I have many concerns about the Mckay school that I will not go into here.) Across the board I have found that those who tout Common Core’s virtues scream them out so loud that it becomes clear that they are trying to cover for it’s massive flaws, and that to me is a great concern.

Second, is the lack of control over the core’s content at the federal level. I have no control in Washington DC, and very little in Salt Lake. I would prefer having the control at the county level, where I can have a say, but that is another subject for another time. How any educator in their right mind can surrender control of what they are supposed to teach to some network of desk bureaucrats thousands of miles away from their classroom is beyond me. It is the height of insanity. Many people have said that this will make it easier for people who move from state to state. That fraction of people, compared to the national population, is laughably small, and is not worth the billions of dollars in deficit spending that we are killing ourselves with to “help.” I was raised in New Mexico, during a time when they were experimenting with a new way to teach writing and spelling. This “New English” turned out to be a dismal failure across the district, and it was very quickly changed at the state. That probably would have never been corrected under the common core system. Too much federal red tape. But even then, there was a whole generation of students, myself included, that struggled greatly with writing and spelling. In fact, it wasn’t until high school, when I finally got a private writing tutor that I actually learned the rules of English that most people I know take for granted.

This problem is already here, but not as much with English (at least as I understand) as it is with math. I am appalled by the dictatorial way that it has been changed to a sub-par system that every math teacher and principle I have talked to opposes and despises. I have yet to meet a single person who thinks this new system is a good thing, in education and out. Those students who I have talked to about it are confused, discouraged, and don’t like it at all. This concerns me greatly because as a physics teacher I count on my students on knowing algebra before they enter my class. Now I realize that I am going to have to teach two classes in one, because I have no clue how many of them know math.

The rest of the concerns that I have listed I hope are obvious to those who are knowledgeable on common core. Please, for the sake of our children let us stop this awful takeover and bring control of our classroom home.

– Stuart Harper

Reference

APP’s Response to Florida Leaders

Leave a comment

Jane Robbins at the American Principle’s Project put together a great resource for Florida’s leaders (and the rest of us) correcting the misinformation being spread by the US Department of Education about Common Core.

For example, the Utah state office of education likes to parrot the talking point that Common Core was internationally benchmarked (false) and since Utah chose the “integrated” math version of Common Core, we are doing what the top Asian nations are doing so we will have similar results. Not only are we NOT doing what the Asian nations are doing, our efforts to push constructivist math are going to do great harm to our students. This is part of Ms. Robbin’s article:

Despite the Common Core proponents’ claim that this mandate promotes “critical thinking,” this is nothing but the same recycled “new math” that was tried and abandoned decades ago. Ignoring this history of failure, Common Core tries again to impose the notion that students must spend less time working math problems and more time explaining the underlying concepts of what they are doing.

Does the research support the argument that students are more successful with math using this technique? To the contrary – research concerning top-performing countries shows that students do better in math if they are required to work math problems (lots of them), not merely explain math problems. A report by the American Educational Research Association examined the math standards of high-achieving countries, Finland, Japan, and Singapore, and discovered very little alignment to Common Core. All three of these countries “place a much greater emphasis on ‘perform procedures’ than found in the U.S. Common Core standards.” In fact, “[f]or each country, approximately 75% of the content involves ‘perform procedures,’ whereas in the Common Core standards, the percentage for procedures is 38%.” If the Common Core math drafters want U.S. students to compete with students from these countries, perhaps imposing standards with only half the math-performance requirements is not the best way to go about it.

Please check out the whole article here:

http://americanprinciplesproject.org/preserve-innocence/2013/our-response-to-florida-republican-leaders-defense-of-common-core/

Concerns

National History/Civics Tests to Disappear

5 Comments

We’ve all heard the line, “those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat the past,” or some variation of it. We all know history is vital, especially the history of the founding of our country. So why cut national history tests unless you really want to deemphasize the importance of history?

http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/2013/07/25/national-civics-history-tests-disappear

“The National Assessment of Educational Progress exams in civics, U.S. history, and geography have been indefinitely postponed for fourth and twelfth graders. The Obama administration says this is due to a $6.8 million sequestration budget cut. The three exams will be replaced by a single, new test: Technology and Engineering Literacy.”

Really? A $6.8 million budget cut and they take out US History tests? Not that I’m a fan of NAEP or anything, but if you’re going to cut something, I can think of a trillion places that would have a lot more economic benefit to our nation.

Concerns

The German Education System by Shana Osterloh

16 Comments

On July 17th, over 500 citizens showed up to share their concerns about Common Core with legislators. Hundreds were unable to share their stories. This is one of them. Shana Osterloh shared this with us and we wanted to make sure people understood exactly what President Obama is talking about when he praises the German school-to-work education system. When the purpose of education becomes managing the needs of the economic workforce instead of educating all children to best meet their needs, interests, and capabilities, we destroy initiative and high achievement on a mass scale. Here is Shana’s talk.

Thank you for the opportunity to voice our concerns on Common Core. I have come across many people who do not know what Common Core is, and others who have felt alone in their fight against it. President Obama has been quoted praising the German education system in his discussion about education reform. I suppose that’s why I felt it was important for parents to hear from someone who has been through a Common Core system in Germany.

What follows is a letter from my husband regarding his experience in Germany. Some parts would need some cultural translation or further discussion, but I believe the overall message is very powerful.

COMMON CORE
As a German growing up in Germany, I always had my battles with common core standards. I was not one of the top students during my school years. I also was not part of the bottom, so I was placed into the path which freely translated we call “middle maturity”. On this path I was set up to pursue a vocational training career unless I could get my grades high enough to study at a Gymnasium (the path required for academics). I managed to skim by with my grades, making it barely into the Gymnasium. However, because my middle path of schooling was not dominantly designed to move up in educational paths I quickly fell behind, lost interest and ended up in a career that did not require academic education, just as predicted when assessed by common standards at grade 6 at the time. (The assessment is done at grade 4 nowadays.)

I pursued the career of a fitness trainer. I was the best student of the year, even the best student that institution has had until that date. I liked my job, but I always had a nudge in the back of my head how I could sustain a family making barely the average income that was usual for fitness trainers in Germany. I tried to calm myself by telling others that I would probably do this job only until about my fifties, and then move up somewhere into an office and work more on the administrative side. But I knew I was lying to myself. I probably would not have had the courage for a career change in my upper fifties.

Once I told my then girlfriend about my career “ambitions”. She was from Arizona and grew up with the American spirit that you can become anything you want. She declared me crazy for settling for so little. She told me that if I really was that smart to outperform my whole training institution till that date, I could also study at a college and secure a better lifestyle.

I told her that in Germany, once you leave Gymnasium, there is no easy return. The Gymnasium I attended previously already had told me that there is no return for me once I left. There is such a thing as night classes, but those are mostly seen as a “second dive for failure”, or “not good/ smart enough for the normal path” by many Germans. So there is no telling once I would have completed such night classes that a university in Germany would have ever accepted me thereafter.

Luckily my then girlfriend did not get off my back hearing these excuses. She encouraged me to go to America and study whatever I want. She believed that I could do it.

A year later I met my wife, who is originally from California. She also told me the same thing; that I could become and do anything I wanted. I still was hesitant and with my German common core depressed upbringing I wondered if I was even good enough for a community college.

As of Fall 2012 I am enrolled in a Utah college and am on my way to change my future working on an associate’s degree in business and accounting with ambitions to rise up to a doctorate level.

I am grateful for the American spirit these two women introduced into my life, freeing me from the shackles of educational depression that was put on me by a common standard. Each person is unique. Who is the government to tell children at age 10 what they can or cannot become in life? What interest does the federal government have in common core standard testing that destroys our children’s vision and imagination for their future? The federal government should not be interested in such as it is to serve its people.

One can argue that Germany makes good products, brings forth good engineers and many other good things. Sadly Germans are also one of the most unpatriotic and job-insecure people you will ever meet. How does that fit together? People feel they always have to compete against the rest of the world while being told “you are not good enough.” Common education standards equalize – not raise – education standards at the expense of people losing their identity.

My brother, by the way is a baker, having been tested by government computers at age 14 that this is what he could become. He still thinks he is not good enough for anything else, or even to start up his own bakery.

I have seen the effects of common core in my own life and had a hard time to break out of this rut. In Germany common core has already broken the hope, vision, and imagination of many people. I am not willing to see another country make the same mistakes. Do not hand over more control to the government. Parents, let us be responsible!

Reference

What do the CC math authors say about them?

9 Comments

The following information is provided by Ze’ev Wurman.

********

The Common Core math standards were written by three people:

Bill McCallum: PhD in mathematics
Jason Zimba:  PhD in mathematical physics
Phil Daro: Masters degree in English, with some involvement in elementary math but almost no knowledge of higher math

What do the math related writers say?

Bill McCallum, a key CCSSM author, said this at the 2010 joint AMS/MAA annual meeting:

“the overall standards would not be too high, certainly not in comparison other nations, including East Asia, where math education excels.”

In March 2010 Jason Zimba, another of the key CCSSM authors, testified in front of the Mass. Board of Ed and said:

“[Common Core’s] concept of college readiness is minimal and focuses on non-selective colleges.”

And just recently we’ve heard from Trevor Packer, Senior VP at the College Board and in charge of its AP program, speaking at the 2013 annual conference of School Superintendents Association (AASA) (video here) and indicating that the Common Core is less rigorous than what high schools routinely teach today and, consequently, the College Board is considering eliminating AP calculus.

“In particular, AP Calculus is in conflict with the Common Core, Packer said, and it lies outside the sequence of the Common Core because of the fear that it may unnecessarily rush students into advanced math classes for which they are not prepared.

The College Board suggests a solution to the problem. of AP Calculus. “If you’re worried about AP Calculus and fidelity to the Common Core, we recommend AP Statistics and AP Computer Science,” he told conference attendees.”

********

So, the two authors who are experts in math say the standards aren’t very high, and the AP college board says AP calculus is in conflict with Common Core and students won’t be prepared for it. It appears Common Core has put calculus on death row.  How can the Utah state board and state office of education continue to maintain that Common Core standards are more rigorous than our A- rated 2007 math standards which got most students through algebra in 8th grade and allows most students to take calculus in 12th? Common Core gets most students to pre-calculus by 12th grade, leaving them to take calculus in college.