Commentary by Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Parents concern over the administration’s controversial Common Core Curriculum reached new heights after an education official implied that children “belong to all of us” and should be educated according to government-set standards.
The Family Research Council (FRC) is reporting that the comments came last Friday during an education roundtable held by the far-left Center for American Progress. Paul Reville, a Harvard professor who served in the Massachusetts Department of Education, made a controversial comment that immediately raised eyebrows with parents.
“Why should some towns and cities and states have no standards or low standards and others have extremely high standards when the children belong to all of us?” Reville said.
He also made the disingenuous assertion that Common Core is not a federally mandated curriculum and that “people have voluntarily entered into this agreement.”
What he neglected to add is that the government is essentially bribing states to participate by offering them $4 billion in funds if they agree to adopt the program.
The meeting only added to the mounting problems Common Core is facing primarily because of its faulty curriculum which has been causing a firestorm of complaints from both parents and educators.
Former fans are beginning to bail. For instance, the New York State United Teachers (NYSUT), which represents 600,000 teachers, recently voted unanimously to pull its endorsement from Common Core.
“We’ll have to be the first to say it’s failed,” said Richard Iannuzzi, President of NYSUT. “[O]ur members don’t see this going down a path that improves teaching and learning. We’re struggling with how to deal with it.”
Some of the nation’s most esteemed Catholic educators, such as Gerard V. Bradley, professor of law at Notre Dame School of Law and Robert P. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University, sent a letter to every bishop in the U.S. asking them to withdraw support for the curriculum which has already been adopted by 100 U.S. dioceses. The letter insists that the Common Core curriculum “approved too hastily and with inadequate consideration of how it would change the character and curriculum of our nation’s Catholic schools.”
They go on to say profess their belief that implementing Common Core would be a grave disservice to Catholic education in America.
“In fact, we are convinced that Common Core is so deeply flawed that it should not
be adopted by Catholic schools which have yet to approve it, and that those schools which have already endorsed it should seek an orderly withdrawal now.”
Just as more and more states begin to reconsider the curriculum, a resolution was introduced yesterday by Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) which objects to the administration’s attempts to buy off state governors with the $4 billion in “Race to the Top” funds which are being used to lure state’s into accepting the program. Graham’s resolution aims at stopping the government from making federal education grants contingent upon their Common Core status.
FRC president Tony Perkins says the “wheels are already coming off” the president’s program and Paul Reville’s “it takes a village approach” didn’t help matters.
“Unfortunately, this is just the logical progression of extreme liberal thinking. Everything — and everyone — belongs to the government to use or control how it sees fit,” Perkins said.
“But if that was supposed to be a persuasive argument for nationalizing education standards — the government’s supposed ownership rights over our sons and daughters — then Common Core is in more trouble that we gave it credit for.
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