By Joy Pullmann
For the third time in a row since Common Core was fully phased in nationwide, U.S. student test scores on the nation’s broadest and most respected test have dropped, a reversal of an upward trend between 1990 and 2015. Further, the class of 2019, the first to experience all four high school years under Common Core, is the worst-prepared for college in 15 years, according to a new report.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress is a federally mandated test given every other year in reading and mathematics to students in grades four and eight. (Periodically it also tests other subjects and grade levels.) In the latest results, released Wednesday, American students slid yet again on nearly every measure
Reading was the worst hit, with both fourth and eighth graders losing ground compared to the last year tested, 2017. Eighth graders also slid in math, although fourth graders improved by one point in math overall. Thanks to Neal McCluskey at the Cato Institute, here’s a graph showing the score changes since NAEP was instituted in the 1990s.
“Students in the U.S. made significant progress in math and reading achievement on NAEP from 1990 until 2015, when the first major dip in achievement scores occurred,” reported U.S. News and World Report. Perhaps not coincidentally, 2015 is the year states were required by the Obama administration to have fully phased in Common Core.
Common Core is a set of national instruction and testing mandates implemented starting in 2010 without approval from nearly any legislative body and over waves of bipartisan citizen protests. President Obama, his Education Secretary Arne Duncan, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Bill Gates, and myriad other self-described education reformers promised Common Core would do exactly the opposite of what has happened: improve U.S. student achievement. As Common Core was moving into schools, 69 percent of school principals said they also thought it would improve student achievement. All of these “experts” were wrong, wrong, wrong.
To call someone a racist is a serious charge. Conservatives are accused of racism by the left on a daily basis. Are the accusations fair? Or is something else going on? Derryck Green of Project 21 provides some provocative answers.
AP Photo/Paul Sakuma
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“Since the 2016 Presidential election, the Girl Scout organization has placed an increasing focus on grooming young voters and future voters by sponsoring and/or promoting progressive political events, like the Teen Vogue Summit, Women’s March, and anti-Trump rallies,” Christy Volanski, co-editor at MyGirlScoutCouncil.com, told Breitbart News.
My Girl Scout Council, founded by Ann Saladin, performs research and provides documentation of the Girl Scout organization’s ties to progressive politics.
“Given Girl Scouts’ membership woes, it’s a bit surprising that the organization continues to isolate conservatives by promoting polarizing political figures and activists like Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Michelle Obama, Andrew Cuomo and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg,” Volanski added.
The Girl Scouts’ G.I.R.L. Agenda 2018 emphasized the need to “mobilize girls” and urged “leading change through civic action.” The organization praised those women and girls who were politically active, advancing a girl-first agenda.
On its blog post that celebrated 2018, the “Year of the G.I.R.L.,” GirlScouts.org touted how its girl members “were inspired, prepared, and mobilized to take civic action” by politicians such as Democrats Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and Jill Biden.
The Girl Scouts boasted that socialist Ocasio-Cortez is an alumna of its organization and reported she attributes much of what got her elected to Congress to being a part of that organization:
How many conversations have we had with our friends, family and co-workers wondering what happened to the millennials? We expect a new generation to have new ideas and new ways of approaching the world. So how do we explain when a new generation is steeped in bullying, complaining about hurt feelings, demanding “safe spaces,” and using pride in fragile egos and weakened emotional states as the excuse to condemn free speech?
There’s more than one swamp eating away at this nation. The ignorant and intolerant meltdown of students is brought to us by a “liberal” education system determined to replace teaching with propaganda and logic and reason with unmoored emotion.
One of the more recent examples comes from last week. College students in New York were thrown out of a student-run coffee shop because their “Make America Great Again” caps violated the “safe space” rules. The offending students were accused of being fascists and given three minutes to leave the premises.
The first article of Bill Ayers ( Weather Underground) praising the New York Democratic mayoral candidate, Bill DeBlasio leads into the second article of how DeBlasio supported Nicaragua’s Sandinista military government in the 1980’s. The third article regards DeBlasio’s position on New York City’s charter schools. If you have friends who will be voting in this New York mayoral race, please share this information to them. Nancy
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Notable & Quotable
Weather Underground co-founder Bill Ayers praises New York Democratic mayoral candidate Bill DeBlasio.
Oct. 17, 2013Weather Underground co-founder Bill Ayers talks to New York magazine about New York Democratic mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio, Oct. 15:
Q: What should NYC voters make of de Blasio’s time in Nicaragua [with the Sandanistas]?
A: They should say that he stood up for humanity. He stood up for human rights against the blind imperial monster. That was the right thing to do then and it’s the right thing to do now. . . .
Q: What about education reform? Are de Blasio’s ideas about universal pre-kindergarten viable?
A: In a decent and humane society, universal preschool education would be a given and so would family leave for all parents, not just mothers. The fact that he at least leans away from the billionaire agenda of privatizing the public space is a terrific thing.
THE WALL STREET JOURNALBill de Blasio, From Managua to ManhattanOctober 7, 2013Nicaragua’s Marxist regime was an inspiration to New York’s leading mayoral candidateThe recent revelation that New York City mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio supported Nicaragua’s Sandinista military government in the 1980s is a reminder of the high cost Latin America pays for being the playground of the American left. It should also further enlighten New Yorkers as to the politics of the man who is the front runner in the race.The ideas of the hard left don’t sell very well in the U.S., so collectivists take them south of the Rio Grande where they believe the ground is more fertile. Their arrogant paternalism ignores the rights of the people they pretend to redeem.
Bill de Blasio, New York City’s public advocate and frontrunner among Democratic candidates for mayor, greets voters on the Upper West side along with his wife Chirlane McCray in this September 10, 2013 file photo. Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
By 1988, when Mr. de Blasio went to Nicaragua to do social work in support of the Marxist revolutionary cause, the Sandinistas had been running the country for almost a decade. Their brutality was well-documented. Mr. de Blasio, who also did fundraising for supporters of the military government, either didn’t know about Sandinista repression or he didn’t care. (more…)
Colleen Hyland is a National Board certified teacher in New York.
As Republicans discuss the future of the party, abandoning conservative values need not be part of the conversation. The party can appeal to larger segments of the electorate without forsaking core principles. One case in point is a group the party has long written off: public school teachers.
Conservative values go hand in hand with teaching. Teachers see the evidence every day that stable families produce well-adjusted kids who succeed in the classroom. Many teachers are people of faith. Most of us are proud Americans who say the pledge every day with our students and mean it. We teach kids how to show respect and use proper manners by modeling them ourselves. We stress personal accountability. We are people who believe in the political process and show up each Election Day because we love our country and are responsible citizens.
Broach the idea of limited government in education and you will find many takers. Teachers are choking under federal, state, and local mandates and regulations. They are stymied by an unrealistic amount of testing that takes time out of teaching and the joy out of learning. We have been hit with layer upon layer of government bureaucracy that pulls us in countless directions. Teachers spend too much of their day with redundant paperwork, wrestling with standards that are overly complex and often contradictory. Get the Department of Education off our backs. Keep it as an information clearinghouse, but give teachers and school districts more control, not less. We crave local control for our local problems. Speak about deregulating our classrooms and we are all ears. (more…)
Louisiana’s new laws will essentially give all parents an average of $8,500 to use for their child’s education as they see fit. They can keep their child in their local public school, but they can also try to get Johnny into a more demanding charter school, or a virtual school, or into special language or career-training courses, among other options.
Nearly 400,000 low-income children—a bit more than half of all students—will also be eligible for vouchers to attend private schools. State officials estimate that about 2,000 students will use vouchers this September given private-school capacity limits, but that tens of thousands will do so over time. (more…)
In case you needed further proof of the American education system’s failings, especially in poor and minority communities, consider the latest crime to spread across the country: educational theft. That’s the charge that has landed several parents, such as Ohio’s Kelley Williams-Bolar, in jail this year.
An African-American mother of two, Ms. Williams-Bolar last year used her father’s address to enroll her two daughters in a better public school outside of their neighborhood. After spending nine days behind bars charged with grand theft, the single mother was convicted of two felony counts. Not only did this stain her spotless record, but it threatened her ability to earn the teacher’s license she had been working on.
AP Photo/Akron Beacon JournalIn January, Ohioan Kelley Williams-Bolar was sentenced to 10 days in jail, three years of probation, and 80 hours of community service for having her children attend schools outside her district. Gov. John Kasich reduced her sentence last month.
Ms. Williams-Bolar caught a break last month when Ohio Gov. John Kasich granted her clemency, reducing her charges to misdemeanors from felonies. His decision allows her to pursue her teacher’s license, and it may provide hope to parents beyond the Buckeye State. In the last year, parents in Connecticut, Kentucky and Missouri have all been arrested—and await sentencing—for enrolling their children in better public schools outside of their districts. (more…)
Who better to lead an educational revolution than Joel Klein, the prosecutor who took on the software giant Microsoft? But in his eight years as chancellor of New York City’s school system, the nation’s largest, Klein learned a few painful lessons of his own—about feckless politicians, recalcitrant unions, mediocre teachers, and other enduring obstacles to school reform.
Above: Joel Klein in Brooklyn on the first day of school, two months before he resigned as chancellorThree years ago, in a New York Times article detailing her bid to become head of the American Federation of Teachers union, Randi Weingarten boasted that despite my calls for “radical reform” to New York City’s school system, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and I had achieved only “incremental” change. It seemed like a strange thing to crow about, but she did have something of a point. New York over the past nine years has experienced what Robert Schwartz, the academic dean of Harvard’s education school, has described as “the most dramatic and thoughtful set of large-scale reforms going on anywhere in the country,” resulting in gains such as a nearly 20-point jump in graduation rates. But the city’s school system is still not remotely where it needs to be.