Monday, June 9, 2014

The New Bill Gates Public Education System

This blockbuster article in the Washington Post gives the true history of the Common Core Standards. It shows how the entire public education system has been bought out, bullied, and snookered into a huge ill advised change in policy by one super wealthy, arrogant school dropout! If you really want to know the true story about Common Core, you must read every word of this story!

Here is what Diane Ravitch says about this story:

"I have written on various occasions (see here and here) that I could not support the Common Core standards because they were developed and imposed without regard to democratic process. The writers of the standards included no early childhood educators, no educators of children with disabilities, no experienced classroom teachers; indeed, the largest contingent of the drafting committee were representatives of the testing industry. No attempt was made to have pilot testing of the standards in real classrooms with real teachers and students.. The standards do not permit any means to challenge, correct, or revise them.
In a democratic society, process matters. The high-handed manner in which these standards were written and imposed in record time makes them unacceptable. These standards not only undermine state and local control of education, but the manner in which they were written and adopted was authoritarian. No one knows how they will work, yet dozens of groups have been paid millions of dollars by the Gates Foundation to claim that they are absolutely vital for our economic future, based on no evidence whatever."