A 5th Grade Teacher Comments on Common Core

The following are excerpts from a Blaze.com interview (May 22) done with Brad McQueen, a 5th grade teacher from Arizona who after working on the development/review of rubrics and questions on the PARCC/Common Core test grew disgusted with what he was seeing and decided to speak out about it, ultimately self-publishing a book titled “The Cult of Common Core.” Below are his comments:

Working on the CCore test was a very different experience and had 50 more shades of bureaucracy. My Common Core handlers weren’t interested in my questions about where the standards came from, who wrote them, who wrote the test questions, etc. If they did attempt an answer they usually parroted the phrase “Teachers were involved.” Something didn’t feel right.

My turning point came when in answer to questions I had about a student writing sample, my Common Core handler blurted out, “We don’t ever care what the kids’ opinions are. If they write what they think or put forth their opinion then they will fail the test.”

I have always taught my students to think for themselves. They are to study multiple views on a given topic, then take their own position and support it with evidence. “That is the old way of writing,” my Common Core handler sighed. “We want students to repeat the opinions of the ‘experts’ that we expose them to on the test. This is the ‘new’ way of writing with the Common Core.”

After a week of work I was convinced of the correctness of my feelings and my research about the Common Core. During this visit I worked with Pearson and ETS on the questions they created for the test. Again we were just window dressing so that they could check the box that “teachers were involved.”

The Common Core is much bigger than just a set of standards, a test, or a data gathering machine. Like a virus, the Common Core tricks its victims into lowering their guard by pretending to be something it is not. But the Common Core isn’t just a mindless infection of our society; rather it is an intentional takeover of our education delivery system and therefore a takeover of our children’s minds. It is a one-size-fits-all, homogenized, centrally controlled education delivery system steeped in Progressive ideology. It is antithetical to everything that makes our country exceptional. This cult is relentlessly pulling our children under its control, with a seemingly endless supply of money, and uses intimidation to silence its opponents.

The Common Core standards are not more rigorous, they are just different. They supposedly only prescribe what is to be learned in K-12 math, reading, and writing. The Thomas Fordham Institute conducted a study in 2010 that compared the Common Core Standards with each of our country’s state standards. They found that 13 states’ standards were at par or better than the new Common Core standards.

The Common Core group confuses “more rigorous” with “more complicated.” In math they boast about how their standards teach less math concepts at each grade level than before, but they teach them deeper. A kid can’t just know that 12-9=3, they have to demonstrate their knowledge of this concept by showing it 5 different ways visually. Many of these ridiculous math problems are posted daily online for the world to see by bewildered parents of equally bewildered children.

That sounds like indoctrination than learning. Why does a child need to show five different ways visually for a simple subtraction problem? It doesn’t make sense.

What this is is a war on school children. How’s that for a meme.