Earlier this year President Obama detailed his new educational initiatives aimed at “closing America’s school readiness gap.” As with all things Obama, it seems that “readiness” is yet another doublespeak term that suggests exactly the opposite of the traditional definition.
At a recent school meeting in Grayslake, Illinois curriculum director Amanda August discusses the new federally mandated Common Core education standards, which are currently being implemented into school districts across the nation.
Here’s how we’re readying America’s children for a highly competitive globalized marketplace:
But even under the new Common Core… even if they said 3 X 4 was 11, if they were able to explain their reasoning and explain how they came up with their answer, really in words and in oral explanations, and they showed it in a picture but they just got the final number wrong, we’re really more focusing on the how and why.
It’s no matter if a student comes to the conclusion that 3 x 4 = 11. So long as they can explain how they made this erroneous determination they go home with an ‘A’.
Watch:
Is it any wonder that, as Michael Snyder notes, our high school students are as dumb as rock, failing to answer the most basic of questions? A study conducted by none other than Common Core shows just how far we’ve fallen at America’s pedagogic institutions:
- Only 60% of students knew that WWI was fought between 1900 and 1950 — they only had to guess the half century!
- One in four high schoolers think Columbus discovered the New World after 1750
- On the multiple choice test, less than half of high schoolers knew when the Civil War was fought. They didn’t even need to know exact dates, just that it was sometime between 1850 and 1900.
- 40% of students could not identify the name of the ocean on the eastern side of the United States.
- Nearly 60% of students could not identify the two major political parties.
- When asked who is in charge of the Executive Branch of the United States, 70% of high school students got the wrong answer.
- Fully 75% of high school students failed to identify the First President of the United States
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