Common Core Concerns Clarifications

I got some questions and explanations about my last post so I wanted to write a clarification.

First, I have no idea if some leaders at the Alpine School District have a socialist agenda.  They have been accused of this by some.  I just wanted to point out that it was strange and that people ought to do their research and look into it.  I do not know if Common Core has anything to do with their mission statement.

Second, I have been told that Alpine School District's mission statement actually reads, "Educating All Students to Ensure the Future of Our Democracy."  Here is an interesting post that annalyzes different parts of their statement (which includes the word "democracy" 13 times).  I don't know if they changed it from "enculturating" to "educating" and took out the words "political and social".  I found this picture taken by someone at the Alpine School District office.  Maybe it was photo-shopped.  If it was, please let me know:

I was asked what is meant by "informational texts".  It means anything that is non-fiction.  Non-fiction materials teach you "facts" (although history cannot be told as pure facts, it is always handed down from a person who was there or heard about it, so it depends on people's perspectives).  Non-fiction books do not talk about the ideas and possibilities of mankind, how those ideas came to be, the moral choices that have built or destroyed character and nations, to name a few things.  Informational texts take the heart out of education, and it is through the heart that understanding occurs and character is built.  I was listening to a talk given at a leadership educational conference by Marlene Peterson, founder of Libraries of Hope.  She wasn't talking about Common Core at all, she was talking about storytelling, but she made this interesting observation,

"No people in the history of the world has managed to hold on to freedom - yet.  When a nation is in crisis, when a nation has lost it's way, it's storytellers who will reset it's course. In World War I, the French bravely held back the invading Germans for four brutal years. Twenty years later, France fell to Nazi Germany in just six weeks. What changed?  Much of the blame was placed squarely on the teachers unions who, in a spirit of pacifism and internationalism, had purged all the schoolbooks of the stories of courage and self sacrifice of their fallen heroes.  Instead the children were bombarded with stories of the horrors of war and the suffering of French and German alike.  How long will our battle for freedom last? If we have only taught our children the mechanics of the constitution and have not told them the stories of what life looks like without freedom; if we have only taught our children the workings of our government and have not told them the stories of the price paid to have that government;  if we have not told our children the stories of what made America the light and hope of the world; then that battle for our freedom will not last long enough.  Karl Marx once said, 'A people without a heritage are easily persuaded.'  Thomas Jefferson said, 'A government is like everything else, to preserve it, we must love it.'  Love is in the heart.  Hearts are fed by stories.  Stories can heal our nation."

The proponents of informational texts would argue that they are teaching children how to think by teaching them to research these informational texts.  If you have gone to college, you are familiar with the kind of research that you must do to write a research paper.  You are asked to read scholarly articles and look at the conclusions that were made by the experts after they have analyzed their data.  If you had a good teacher, you might have been asked to analyze the data yourself to find flaws in the analysis to better support your point of view (I had one teacher like this).  These research papers teach you to be reliant on experts, not how to reason and find truth for yourself.  If you went to college, you are also aware that when it comes to the "social sciences" you can find articles that "prove" or support any claim you want to make,

Another clarification- the reason I quoted 1984 in my post was to show that wording does matter, despite the "intent" of the mission statement about what democracy means.  Words are a way to influence and to attempt to control thoughts and ideas.

A teacher wrote to me about her feelings about Common Core.  She expressed that she is happy about greater flexibility in how she teaches, compared to "No Child Left Behind" and that the reason for more informational texts is that students were spending all of their time reading fantasy, which isn't a bad thing, but not enough time reading stuff that teaches them something.  She also said that parents no longer have time to teach their children basic things that parents used to teach their children so this will give the schools the ability to teach those things that parents are not teaching.  She said, "not all parents are like you"  and have the time and knowledge to teach their children.

This comes from a good, conservative teacher.  I'm guessing this is the kind of thing they are telling teachers in their teacher training, but it makes me a little, okay a lot, concerned.  First of all, teachers cannot yet know how much flexibility they'll have in teaching their subjects because the assessments have not yet been written.  I'm sure it feels more flexible than "No Child Left Behind" right now because "No Child Left Behind" already has assessments.  We don't have the new assessments yet so we don't know how much school time will be taken in trying to get the children to do well on them.  We have adopted something when we don't even yet know what we'll have to be teaching.

About the informational texts, I agree that too many children are spending too much time reading junk, but I think children would benefit TREMENDOUSLY not from reading informational texts, but from reading good quality literature. 

And lastly, if we think that parents are no longer teaching their children well, our focus ought to be to support the family to do a better job - not to take over their job for them.  This is the typical "You don't know how to do it well, so let the government fix your problem" argument that spins us into relying on government and becoming dependent.  God put us here as families, parents are responsible for the education of their children.  God will not hold the schools accountable, but parents.  If parents are handing over that responsibility to the schools, then we are in A LOT of trouble and our nation will not last.  The school's job used to be to support the family in the teaching of their children.  Now the parents are being asked to support the school.

I think our nation would do well if we all tried reading Animal Farm  one more time...