With the new academic year having gotten underway, it’s always good for parents to assess what their children will be learning, especially with the curriculum being nationalized.
In 2009, the National Governors Association launched the Common Core State Standards Initiative (“Common Core”) which is an attempt to nationalize the curriculum so that high school students who graduate in every state that adopts the Common Core will “be best positioned to compete successfully in the global economy.”
Who possibly could be against that goal?
In her book, Don’t Let the Kids Drink the Kool-Aid: Confronting the Left’s Assault on Our Families, Faith, and Freedom, Marybeth Hicks tells parents who enroll their children in Catholic schools they should be very wary, if not opposed to the Common Core.
Why so?
Not for the usual reasons conservatives assert: who’s really behind the Common Core (e.g., the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation along with David Coleman, President of the College Board and architect of the Common Core) as well as the content it requires students to learn (e.g., social justice mathematics, using class and race conflict to explain American history).
Hicks tells her readers how the Common Core now is infecting Catholic schools nationwide because, although dioceses are not required to adopt the Common Core, they must do so if students are to demonstrate mastery on the tests measuring what students have learned (as that is measured using the standard of the Common Core designed by Coleman whose company makes the tests). Hicks quotes Sarah Dalske, a Catholic school parent living in Sacramento:
My children go to Catholic school, and over 100+ [d]ioceses have adopted the [Common Core] because it’s what “has to be done” if we want our kids to get into college and be prepared and also be prepared to enter the “workforce” and earn a “living wage.”
In a letter Dalske wrote to the Diocese of Sacramento, she argued:
[Are] you telling me in future grades my kids will be reading such books as “Freakonomics” and “The Tipping Point,” learning that abortion is one of the was to lower crime…? How would Catholic school teachers reconcile this while simultaneously teaching that all life is sacred and every baby has the right to life, that every person is give a soul at the moment of conception by God and has the God-given right to be brought into this world?….After all the new and confusing math and reading lessons, and the “literacy” lessons through science, history and technology, after all the testing, where will the time be to teach our children their faith?
The lesson for parents who send their children to Catholic schools?
Lest they believe Catholic schools provide immunity from the infection of a curriculum that’s opposed to Catholic teaching, they had better—like Sarah Dalske—investigate precisely what their children are being taught and when they are being taught it.
In Catholic schools, the goal of training the nation’s youth for the workforce is not antithetical to the goal of educating their souls in the faith of the Catholic Church. If Dalske’s statistic is correct, in many dioceses the former may become more prominent than the latter…if it hasn’t already.
This is an excellent opportunity for Catholic schools to contrast the propaganda of Copmmon Core with the truths of the Catholic Faith. It is also an opportunity for Catholic school teachers to contrast the propaganda of Common Core iwth the reality and facts of freedom. “In loco parentis” power of attorney of parents that parents are the first teachers of their children and the state may not deny any parent access to his child while in any school, public or private. Let the parent question the prmises of Common Core in front of the students with Faith and Reason and the founding principles of our nation and independence.
The admirable Frédéric Bastiat summed it up perfectly in a speech to the National Assembly
“There are some who say: “Teaching as a career is going to be free, for everyone will be able to enter upon it.” This is a great illusion.
The state—or rather, the party, the faction, the sect, the man, that is in momentary and even quite legal possession of the governmental power—can give to education the desired direction and mould men’s minds at will solely by means of the system of academic degrees.
Give a man the power to confer academic degrees and, while leaving anyone free to teach, education will be, in fact, in servitude…
Now, what does the state do? It says to us: “Teach what you want to your student; but when he is twenty years old, I shall question him concerning the opinions of Thales and Pythagoras; I shall have him scan the verses of Plautus; and if he is not good enough in these matters to prove to me that he has devoted the whole of his youth to them, he will be able to become neither a physician nor a barrister nor a magistrate nor a consul nor a diplomat nor a teacher.””
Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia. Students came when they willed, studied what they willed and left when they willed. No degress was conferred. Thomas Edison had no degree.
The students can and will think for themselves.
Even some home-school curricula are hopping on the “Common Core” bandwagon. I recently ordered Sea to Shining Sea from the Catholic Textbooks Project, volumes which are used by some dioceses and which are used in some Catholic home-school programs. Much to my surprise, the new teacher manual I got along with it made reference to how Sea to Shining Sea aligned with Common Core. Math U See, a popular math series also added on some Common Core promoted ideas, although I am not sure what since I think those are mostly in the younger grades, not so much at the high school level. Still, interesting that they felt the need to point out that “Hey! We are Common Core worthy too!”
this is where home schooling comes into play…..
JAC wrote, “this is where home schooling comes into play…..”
But as long as the public examinations are the gateway to the professions, whoever determines their content will, in fact, determine the curriculum for home-schoolers.
I don’t support “Common Core” at all and have written to my state legislature complaining about it, the costs, associated, etc, but for the tests to be aligned to Common Core might not affect home-schoolers that adversely. Case in point, two of my children have been home-schooled and taking the IOWA for several years now. While they’ve never been in the 99 percentile that all the other home- schoolers appear to be in, they’ve done pretty well, generally better than national average.
This past year, they took the “new and improved” IOWA (aligned the Common Core), and again, they scored quite acceptably, even in the so-called “Common Core” domains. Will their scores ever get them to Harvard or some other “select” university? No, but then, I wouldn’t pay for that either, and if some miracle were to occur and they got a full ride scholarship, would do my best to discourage them going.
Most home-schoolers I know are strongly resistant to “Common Core” and would tend to shy away from materials that say “aligned to Common Core.”
There are other good reasons for parents of Catholic school students to be wary. Many Catholic school graduates are attending universities that promote abortion, by allowing pro-abort groups on campus, and have pro-abort speakers at graduation or other events. Most, but not all, of these colleges seem to be run by Jesuits. This has to cause confusion in kids supposedly taught that abortion is wrong.
Many of these parents are giving tacit approval of a pro-abort agenda by participating in the “box tops for education” program run by General Mills, which donates ONE MILLION DOLLARS OR MORE – ANNUALLY – to the Susan G Komen Race for the Cure, which, as most people are now aware, gives a portion of their ill-gotten gains to Planned Parenthood. The Superintendent of Schools for the archdiocese of New Orleans flatly refuses to withdraw from that program, on the grounds that General Mills does not directly contribute to PP, and so continues to promote profit for this baby-killing food giant.
Taken by itself, this is another perfect illustration of the arrogance and self-importance of the Progressive Left. But there is a chink in the armor – these tests and whatnot are all based on the premise that “everybody goes to college.” This progression is not etched in stone, and may soon be radically different.
With tuition costs skyrocketing and an increasing number of college graduates burdened with insurmountable debt, coupled with bleak (and soon to be a whole lot bleaker) employment opportunity, it will be the dam bursting as traditional high-school-to-college-because-that’s-what-you-do-next becomes untenable. People will simply stop sending their kids to $50,000 a year schools to get $30,000 a year degrees. Once that money stream constricts, the colleges will have to make some tough decisions about degrees offered and environmental ‘perks.’ Then, the whole curricular set-up comes into question. When the money gets tight because the incoming freshman class is now 70% of what it was two years ago, how likely is it that the Womyn’s Peace Poetry Department’s budget will be approved? “MultiCultural Awareness Centers” will be restored to their more utilitarian functions as dry goods warehouses for the dorm cafeterias, since those high-cost vegan menu choices will have to go. And so forth.
Scholarship candidates may be much more finely examined, and with that higher level of investment in play, behavior codes could become more restrictive. They may even resemble what they were in the 1970s. Oh, Happy Day!
Trade schools and professional, on-line degree programs have neither room nor need for such extraneous fluff, so those academic alternatives will become more and more popular as they are much more flexible and can respond to tuition market forces much more readily. The hide-bound Ivy Halls will either adapt or die; an attrition rate of about 25-30%, mostly in the ranks of medium-sized universities that used to be small colleges, where tenured mediocrity has festered for the past half-century, is not unreasonable. College could again become the destination for only those in pursuit of a knowledge-specific professional career – sciences, law, medicine – and the truly, honestly gifted in the arts. The rest will be more than well served by either a trade school or other industry-oriented program.
Supply and demand – The Invisible Hand – will eventually break whatever chains the fascist left claps on it. Once it’s no longer a lead-pipe cinch that 97% of Central High’s graduating class is going to college, but rather is headed to a much more diverse academic array, the people will simply demand greater accountability and provision from their public schools. This will necessitate a much greater general knowledge core since the trade and technical schools won’t have the capacity for “Remedial Composition” or “Principles of Mathematics” courses that should have been taught in 10th grade. Such programs may have these courses now, but in the leaner times to come, every penny will be pinched.
This may all be the musing of a frustrated iconoclast, but the pieces are falling into place. It may only take the coming year’s economic reversal to start the dominoes falling. Sooner started, sooner done, I say.
W K Aiken
It always surprises me that the US has no equivalent to the French grandes écoles. For example, the most prestigious school for science and technology, the equivalent of, say, MIT, is the École polytechnique, known as “X” Admission is by competitive examination, after a preliminary course at one of a number of “feeder” schools. It is run by the Ministry of Defence and its students are salaried as reserve officers in training. Post-graduate studies in physics and chemistry are undertaken at the École des Mines de Paris (originally a school for mining engineers)
Similarly, one has the Sciences Po (Institut d’études politiques de Paris) for political science. The President of the Republic, François Hollande, is a graduate, as was Jacques Chirac and François Mitterrand. Nicolas Sarkozy attended, but failed his English exam. The last 13 Prime Ministers and any number of other ministers also went there.
University lecturers and some secondary school heads are trained at the École normale supérieure, senior civil servants at the École nationale d’administration.
Then, there is the École nationale de la magistrature trains students to become judges and prosecutors and so on. I was once asked to give a talk there on the Hague Conference on Private International Law.
In all cases, tuition is free and the students salaried as state functionaries, although many ultimately go on to senior positions in the private sector.
Michael Paterson-Seymour
I’m sure the esteemed panel here at TAC could discuss more eloquently than I could why the French and American systems are so divergent. Whether either is “better” is probably a subjective question anyway, since “better” means “better for whom?”
Nonetheless, a system here with some sort of stability that resembles the French system, and its well-defined purpose, would be a good thing, regardless of other aspects. Today, American universities almost take that name literally, trying to be “all things to all people.”
The storm is coming, no doubt. What emerges apres le deluge remains to be seen.
WK Aiken
Both the US and France have military academies – West Point and Saint-Cyr. The French simply take it one step further by also training scientists, engineers, administrators and even politicians for the public service. The period of enlistment is 10 years from enrollment, or 6 or 7 years from graduation. Some are bought out by prospective employers,
My law agent’s daughter is an X/mines graduate and technical director of a nuclear power station. Her education did not cost her, or her parents, a sou. The polytechnique is not noted for imparting social skills; when I told her of my forthcoming talk at the École nationale de la magistrature, she looked at me open-mouthed and then gasped, “in French?”
Michael Paterson-Seymour
That’s very funny. “Why no, dear child. Mandarin!”
My eldest cousin retired a few years back from the post of VP for Refinery Development at BP. His undergraduate studies at Purdue and his masters and doctorates at Princeton were completely paid via scholarship, so there is similarity. It’s just more random, typically American-style. He also had no obligation to anybody when he finally left academics, not that it mattered.
My daughter is a sophomore nursing student at Bellarmine University in Louisville, and she has a situation that is more after-the-fact. Upon her successful graduation, she has a post waiting at a local, multi-complex health network, which will pay off her student loans as part of a compensation package, given a five-year obligation on her part. She has a half-tuition scholarship now, but even with that it’s a fairly hefty debt load. Without that guarantee, she would never have pursued the option to go to Bellarmine.
Variations on a theme, but only for those who are focused on a specific professional career that requires that kind of instruction, and are talented enough to get it. The standard “college just because high school is over” student is in for a pretty difficult time, very soon.
Michael Paterson-Seymour — thank the Lord for websites like http://www.cardinalnewmansociety.org/TheNewmanGuide.aspx
This is a guide for all Catholic homeschoolers who plan on sending their kids to authentic Catholic colleges. I have faith that these colleges will not succumb to the common core. I also wonder if the common core dumbs down students’ work, will the SAT/ACT be dumbed down also, thereby giving homeschoolers even more of an advantage than they have now. I know several homeschoolers who send their kids to community colleges for dual credit. When some colleges see this, they do not require the SAT/ACT because the kids already have college credits that they’re transferring in.
There are homeschooling programs, like Seton Home Study School, that will never succumb to the common core.
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