Friday, April 19, 2013

MORE's Patrick Walsh: Fear and Loathing and the Common Core

... everything about the Common Core State Standards
Initiative, beginning with its name, stinks to high heaven. Everything about this privately funded, privately owned, secretly created scheme, sponsored by the un-elected National Governors Association and given pseudo academic legitimacy by the equally unelected but lofty sounding Council Of Chief State School Officers, is meant to obscure or hide altogether what the Common Core is, why it exists and how it came — ready or not –  to be rammed down the throat of almost every school kid in American — including the ten year olds I saw pointlessly suffer through  it the  past three days. --- Patrick Walsh

While MORE as an organization has not delved into the common core waters, most MOREs like Patrick are strongly against it. I for one am against it because people like Susan Ohanian and Leonie Haimson are against it while all the corporate slugs mentioned by Patrick, a MORE candidate for UFT Executive Board elementary school, are for it. Plus of course Randi Weingarten and Michael Mulgrew.

Patrick, another great MORE candidate, writes the Raginghorseblog.
He is a chapter leader in a Harlem elementary school. 

Fear and Loathing and the Common Core

April 18, 2013 CC g

This morning, like yesterday morning and the morning before that, I was complicit in the wholesale corporatization of American public school education, playing my small but essential role in a corporate experiment of unprecedented proportions and titanic intent.     This morning and yesterday morning and the morning before that, I, like thousands of my fellow teachers, administered to my students the first of a promised endless battery of New York State standardized tests, all aligned to the new Common Core State Standards, all designed to insure the ten year olds in my charge were on track to be “college and career ready”, the better to help them succeed in the global economy and “win the future.”
Read MORE at
http://raginghorse.wordpress.com/2013/04/18/fear-and-loathing-and-the-common-core/

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