Misuse of Common Core State Standards

About a year ago I read an interesting article about the Common Core Standards for Mathematics in public schools.
It sounded like a good Idea, so I was wondering how school administrators, lobbyists and policy makers were going to screw them up. It didn't take long to find out.
As usual, they put the emphasis on testing.

Typical cart-before-the-horse thinking. Instead of really making sure that the teaching methods were in place and working, they got to work on creating tests.

They didn't rely on feedback from teachers first.

Teachers are the ones in the trenches, who know their students and their needs best.
But did they trust the teachers? Noooooooo.
..
they made up high-stakes testing that pigeonhole children into categories.
As usual, tests were used as clubs to punish children for not jumping through the right hoops, even though they aren't adequately taught which hoops to jump through, nor how to jump through them (as though jumping through hoops would be the right way to learn, anyway.) This thing is not about learning, nor teaching.
Like so many other things that are going to hell in a child's school backpack, it is about some damned lobbying group or corporation selling their "one-best-solution" to every school.
It's a great way for someone to corner the market on something, without thoroughly understanding what they are doing to the end-users (the students.
) The reason schools are forced to change the curriculum every time you turn around is because every time they change it, some Cosmo-Demonic Educational Company makes another killing on the new methods.

It's about planned obsolescence, not about education.
This is a damned shame. It doesn't have to be that way. In the March, 2013 issue of NYSUT United (the organ of the New York State United Teachers - yes, that's a union, and a very important one) on page 22 someone suggested, "Spend less money on formal assessments and more on collaboration between teachers.

Nations that rank high in achievement do this (Japanese Lesson Study, for example.

)" Imagine that. Doing something that makes sense and gets results instead of something that makes dollars and gets kickbacks! Companies that make fortunes off the backs of students, parents and teachers would like to have us believe that class size doesn't make a difference if you have the technology to catalogue and assess each student quickly with the right software. That is because they are selling software and technology, not education.

Only an absolute idiot or con-man would tell you that smaller classes aren't better, and direct, face-to-face input isn't better than a screen.
Some things need to be learned by technology in the twenty-first century, but not as much as the shysters would have us believe.
No technology is going have the human touch that makes us, well, human.

No program can encourage and inspire like a good teacher.
We need to invest in more good teachers.

We need to re-humanize education.
The Common Core Standards are a one-size-fits-all solution that makes testing easier, but teaching and learning harder. It spells out what needs to be learned, but it doesn't do a thing about teaching or learning it.

The intentions may have been good, but we all know where the road paved with good intentions leads. Especially when there are so many hucksters lining up on the side of that road, waiting to fleece anyone who walks down it.

The re-humanization of the school experience must take precedence over the over-technofication of it.

Actually, maybe re-humanization is the wrong term.

It alludes to a time when things were all humane and hunky-dory in the school system that never actually existed.
Maybe more thought has to be put into finding what would really make the educational system a humanizing and enlightening experience.
That would not be done best by the policy-makers, politicians, lobbyists, educational corporations and others who have a bottom line other than the betterment of humanity and the education of our children.
It might best be done by cooperation between teachers and parents.

This should not be a federal issue, nor a state issue (as some politicians in various doofus-states like to espouse.

) It should be a global issue.

Learn from the best, communicate with the best.

Some might worry that this is trial-and-error tactics. No, that is what schools have been doing so far.
I'm talking about trial-and-success. Common Core State Standards are just another delusion by the "one-best-method" hucksters. Until their next one-best-method is published.

Think about it.