Complete with pictures, Crazy Crawfish, a blogger in Louisiana often quoted by Diane Ravitch, is reporting that protests over the Common Core have sprung up in St Tammany Parish. It’s getting ugly, he writes, with the state’s top school official bullying community members through the local newspaper.
I suppose it’s possible that the pictures were staged, photos of lawns with signs against the Common Core planted along the street to a high school where State Superintendnt John White gave a presentation about the Common Core. His community engagement session was supposed to go smoothly but turned into an “embarrassment,” Crazy Crawfish said.
Then, the local newspaper didn’t mention anything about the protest, he said, as they stuck to their line about how great the Common Core is. Crazy Crawfish even said Mr White instructed the newspaper’s reporters to bully local residents who posted signs by asking them if they were aware of the local sign-posting ordinances. If that is true, it compares to other unethical behavior by top school officials at shutting down protests over the Common Core.
Welcome to the Common Core on the streets!! A similar session in Baltimore County, Md., intended to disseminate information about the Common Core, had school officials order an off-duty police officer to remove, with force, a parent who spoke out against the Common Core. On the panel at that session were the local school superintendent and the state superintendent of schools, Dr Lillian M Lowery.
For the record, the signs along the road in Louisiana said things like “Stop Fed Ed,” “We know what the Common Core is, and we reject it,” and “Common Core hurts children.” One even claims that the “Common Core is not college material.” What I can do here is address the majority of these road signs, which are certainly sincere.
Stop Fed Ed; Keep Education Local
This sign is a reference to the way the Common Core is being implemented in more than 40 states. Because the federal government attached grants in the Race to the Top competition to an acceptance of the Common Core by state legislatures, many people assume the Common Core was created by the federal government. It was not, in fact, but the attachment of the standards to RttT grants has understandably led people to believe that the federal government was behind the Common Core. What is certain, though, is that even if the federal government wasn’t in the picture at the beginning—which has still not been proven—they got behind the Common Core very soon after the standards were developed.
Common Core is not college material
This road sign is 100 percent accurate. The Common Core state standards aren’t directed at colleges, but they represent standards of learning that begin in kindergarten and go through high school, including honors classes in high school.
There’s nothing Christian about Common Core
True again. Undisputed.
John White, Lousiana doesn’t believe anymore
I’m not really sure what this sign is about. Surely the people of Louisiana believe in something. This appears, on its face, to be a statement that people don’t want John White to serve as the state superintendent anymore. That is, they express no confidence in his ability to lead the schools. As that is an opinion, I have no argument for it.
We know what Common Core is, and we reject it
Knowing what the Common Core is is tough to prove. I work with the standards every day, and even I don’t know much about it. It’s a big document, and we are just now beginning to understand how it plays out in actual classrooms. None of it was tested prior to states’ acceptance of it, so in one sense, I can support an argument that nobody really knows what it is. In that sense, the assertion on the road sign is invalid and represents an attempt to persuade readers of the amazing knowledge held by those people displaying the sign. They may or may not have that knowledge, but I have no way of assessing the validity of their assertion. If I accept their premise, however, I note that they have every right to reject the Common Core, but they do not run the public schools in the state of Louisiana.
No more fuzzy math
This is ostensibly an attack on the mathematics standards in the Common Core. The math is just as fuzzy as it has ever been, in the learning standards of every state. Therefore, the sign must be interpreted as missing the mark or simply restating a general protest against learning standards in general, which were in place long before the Common Core.
Children are not guinea pigs
In other words, using children to test the standards is immoral. All we have in our hand is the Common Core, yet we have thrown their futures into the pot. The Common Core is untested, and we don’t know that implementing the standards will lead to success for these students at all. Using the Common Core to collect this evidence, without their permission, is unethical.
That is true, but that’s not exactly what the Common Core is doing. True, it has not been tested, but the motives of educators who developed the standards are a long way from risking the future of our children in order to collect information. As any new invention gets going, developers continuously test it and collect information about its performance in order to make improvements.
Oh wait! There are currently no plans to use the data to improve the Common Core, which is considered, at this point, as sacred as the Bible for Christians. This needs to change, or the questioning of using children to run an experiment about how good the standards are is justifiable.
I think that’s about all of them. Thanks to Crazy Crawfish for a wonderful post and an amazing blog! I’m glad to see at least some people take a strong interest in their children’s education, and I wish school officials would be a little more open about listening to those people.
