Common Core Is Corporate Welfare for Textbook Giants

[Lucille]

http://reason.com/blog/2014/06/06/common-core-is-corporate-welfare-for-tex


Opponents of Common Core have plenty of ammunition by now: The standards erode local autonomy, are costly to implement, and some experts dispute their rigor.

But an underexplored aspect of this problematic national education reform is the massive financial incentive that certain textbook and standardized test companies have to keep the U.S. on board with it. The Washington Post's Valerie Strauss provided a good example of Common Core's crony corporatist side in a recent article.

There are two large, multi-state partnerships tasked with implementing Core-aligned standardized tests, and one of them—the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC)—recently invited curriculum companies to compete for the contract to design the tests. Textbook giant Pearson won the contract, surprising no one. Pearson, a British company, is the largest publisher of education materials in the world.

A PARCC press release described the selection of Pearson as the result of a "competitive bidding process." But it's hard to tell whether the process was truly competitive, given that Pearson was the only company to even submit a bid.

Now, another corporation is alleging that the process was unfairly biased toward Pearson from the start, according to Education Week:


A protest of the contract was made by the nonprofit corporation American Institutes for Research, which alleged that that the bidding process conducted by the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) was biased in favor of Pearson and that is why AIR did not submit a bid which it otherwise would have done, Education Week reported. The protest was made to officials in New Mexico who were serving as a representative of PARCC in making the call for proposals from companies to win the contract.

Judge Sarah M. Singleton of the Santa Fe First Judicial District issued a ruling last week putting the Pearson contract on hold while officials reviewed the contract bidding process.

Keep in mind that the contract is worth so much money that officials haven't even attached a formal price tag. Instead, they have used the phrase "unprecedented in scale."

Common Core's most fervent defenders might not see the problem with any of this. They might even say it's a good thing that the biggest testing company on the planet is the one designing the exams for Common Core.

But it certainly undermines the notion that this is a "bottom up" education reform when state and federal lawmakers are colluding with mega corporations to dictate the tests to local school districts. Students in some states are already serving as guinea pigs for the new testing regime.

Keep in mind that many teachers will need to be retrained so that they can prepare their students to pass the Core–aligned tests. Schools across the country will have to purchase new computers before they are even logistically capable of administering the tests. Taxpayers are going to feel the pain, and Pearson is going to reap the profits.

Previously: http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?445548-Follow-the-Money-Common-Core-Making-these-People-Filthy-Rich

[Lucille]

Common Core Textbook Saleswoman: ‘I Hate Kids’
"I hate kids. I'm in it to sell books, don't even kid yourself for a heartbeat."
http://thefederalist.com/2016/01/12/common-core-textbook-saleswoman-i-hate-kids/


“You don’t think that the educational publishing companies are in it for education do you? No,” she said. “They’re in it for the money. The fact that they have to align the educational standards is what they have to do to sell the books.”
[...]
It’s all a money game,” said Jodi Cohen, who is identified in the video as a teacher in Brooklyn, New York.

This isn’t the first time the K-12 educational standards have come under fire. It has long been criticized as a get-rich-quick scheme for textbook publishers that won’t improve a child’s educational outcomes in the 42 states (and Washington D.C.) which have adopted the federal standards. Common Core math homework is notoriously difficult and confusing, spurring many befuddled parents to take their frustrations to social media.

You can watch the entire undercover video here.

Related: Follow the Money: Common Core Making these People Filthy Rich
http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?445548-Follow-the-Money-Common-Core-Making-these-People-Filthy-Rich

[DamianTV]

Didnt one of the Rockefellers say something to the effect of "We will take the trades and skills that were once done by families and teach the children how to do a perfect measure of work in an imperfect way."?

One of the big problems with indoctrination over education is that it teaches State Worship practically as a religion over the information being conveyed. If you worship your state, then and only then does 2 + 2 = 4. If you dont worship your assigned child farm, then 2 + 2 != 4 no matter what. The issue has nothing to do with the information being presented, but by the the way it is presented. First, it is presented to our youth by those who have never worked in those trades, so they have a lot of misinformation. This changes a bit when you get to college level, but is still present. As a consequence, our children are being taught to do things by those who do not have experience in doing those things. This is the opposite of a family trade. Dad knows construction. They teach their sons. They know how to do things from experience and are not giving daily evaluations that go on their kids permanent records. When the kids dont understand something, that only exists until the parent teaching their trade teaches them so they do understand. In todays educational system, if you do not understand something, it is pretty much a permanent black mark on your obedience score for the rest of your life.

Then you get Common Core. The way the information is presented actually shuts down thinking instead of encouraging it. What happens is the way the information is presented causes "static" between the left and right hemispheres of the brain. In order to validate this statement, I want you to try something. Pause reading this and do this as quickly as possible.

You have 30 seconds to come up with 50 words that do not contain the letter A.

START NOW.

If you did this exercise, you most likely failed. What you just experienced was static overload in the communication between the left and the right hemispheres of the brain. The arbitrary time limit creates a stress pattern that prevents you from instead thinking about patterns that can be applied so that you can complete your task. Now, lets do the exact opposite and instead enable the two hemispheres of your brain to work together. I'll do this by giving you a Pattern to follow, then assigning you the same task. The task assigned you with finding 50 words that do not contain the letter A in the word. So words like Cat and Ham and Fat fail the qualifications, but words like Click and Thick and Slick work. Youre already starting to see part of a pattern, but here is a better pattern. The first occurence of the letter A when counting happens at "One Thousand", or 1,000. Now that you are primed with a pattern that will enable you to complete your task, try it again. Same rules apply, but this time, apply your pattern and just count to fifty.

You have 30 seconds to speak 50 words that do not contain the letter A in them.

START NOW.

Most likely, you succeeded this time. What happened this time and the reason that you succeeded is that you used muscle memory to apply the pattern of simple counting instead of trying to select words then check each word as you spoke or thought it to see if it had the letter A in it. Muscle memory is much faster than remembering a random word and applying your "no A letter" filter to each word. You can speak each word without having to apply the filter, which makes things go very fast. The results of this type of teaching enables students to think for themselves and recognize patterns, but going the other way and putting arbitrary time limits on constant tests causes the static between the two hemispheres and students instead learn to not think.

This is but one of many ways that our current educational model fails our children. Those with experience in fields will always be the best teachers, yet, we expect those with no experience in those fields to be the teachers of the children that hold our futures fate in our hands. On a neurological level, it is very deep so it is almost guaranteed that not a single teacher will understand why their trained methods of teaching are not being absorbed by the kids. They may see that they are somehow failing their students, but wont be able to understand why, and without the understanding of why, will not be able to overcome the problem, thus resulting in our children continuing to fail their tests.

This is exactly what Common Core does. It teaches our children to be stupid, and dependent on the system that is, by design, throwing them overboard. Common Core fails by placing monetary value on books sold and not true comprehension.

If anyone is actually interested in a good teacher, go look up John Taylor Gatto. He understands specifically what is wrong with our system, and understanding those specifics enable us to overcome those issues.

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A couple of decent examples:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiTz2i4VHFw

For a bit more topical but very interesting examples, check out Brain Games, its a NTGEO show.