New Evidence Shows Common Core Has Been a Total Disaster

This article was originally posted at Townhall. Most public schools are still afflicted with the Common Core national standards. Paid advocates such as the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation continue to push Common Core despite overwhelming evidence of the slow-motion train wreck that has resulted – reduced student achievement by almost every metric. Fordham refuses even to acknowledge the bad news, much less try to rationalize it. That’s why it was refreshing to hear the blunt truth proclaimed at a Heritage Foundation event last week entitled “Rethinking Federal Intervention in K-12 Education.” At this program the authors of a new Pioneer Institute study, “Common Core, School Choice and Rethinking Standards-Based Reform,”

Common Core Has Utterly Failed — But These Supporters Won’t Let It Go

This article was originally posted at Townhall. Proponents of the failed and destructive Common Core experiment refuse to let it go. Bill Gates, who funded a large chunk of Common Core development and marketing despite knowing essentially nothing about education, has yet to admit that it simply didn’t work out. Gates apparently believes there’s nothing wrong with Common Core that more of his money and invaluable guidance can’t fix. The same obtuseness animates a new report from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, which for some reason the press generally refers to as “conservative” or “right-leaning.” Fordham’s schtick for some years has been evaluating and assigning

Government Preschool Doesn’t Work — And Here’s the Proof

This article was originally posted at The American Spectator and co-authored by Dr. Karen Effrem, president of Education Liberty Watch. On the theory that more government programs can solve any public-education problem, bipartisan policymakers have embraced government-funded pre-K programs as the current fix. The federal Every Student Succeeds Act dangles multiple incentives, including new Preschool Development Grants, to coax states into taking more young children from their families and enrolling them in government preschool. Advocates claim the $7.6 billion spent on state pre-K programs will result in improved academic achievement and a multitude of societal benefits. But a new study from the center-left think tank Brookings douses these

Privacy Alert: Will China Soon Be Using Big Data to Influence U.S. Students?

This article was originally posted at The Federalist. The recent Facebook controversy focused Americans’ attention on the dangers of uncontrolled access to and use of individual online data. But as a nation we have a notoriously short attention span, which Big Business and Big Data count on to enable business as usual. Beginning with our children’s education data and continuing for the rest of their lives, the sky’s the limit for what can be done when all that glittering data is sifted, stirred, and exploited. Some states have enacted certain protections for students’ online data, but most of these statutes allow sale of

“Nation’s Report Card” Shows More Failing Grades for Common Core

This article was originally posted at The Hill and co-authored by Emmett McGroarty, a senior fellow at the American Principles Project. Since the Common Core national standards were dumped on American schools beginning in 2010, national and state education officials have largely either ignored or belittled parental concerns about the resulting deterioration of education. The establishmentarians are now reaping what they’ve sown. With a vested interest in the success of Common Core, these officials have been dreading release of the 2017 NAEP scores (the National Assessment of Educational Progress, AKA the “nation’s report card”). As of Tuesday, the bad news is here. The best

Why Is the College Board Politicizing AP History Classes?

This article was originally posted at The Federalist and co-authored by Emmett McGroarty, a senior fellow at the American Principles Project. History repeats itself. The College Board, which controls much of the curriculum in American high schools through Advanced Placement (AP) courses that can earn college credit, continues its game of leaning as far left as it can before criticism from scholars and parents pulls it back from the brink. In our last episode, the College Board responded to the uproar over its leftist revised AP U.S. History (APUSH) framework by issuing a new framework that incorporated some of the critiques but

American Test Scores Are Nosediving. Is Common Core to Blame?

This article was originally posted at The American Spectator and co-authored by Emmett McGroarty, a senior fellow at the American Principles Project. In 2013 Michael Cohen of Achieve, Inc. (an organization integral to developing and marketing the Common Core national standards) testified in New York that Common Core is a long-term education experiment on our children: “The full effects… won’t be seen until an entire cohort of students, from kindergarten through high school graduation, has been effectively exposed to Common Core teaching.” Four years later we may not be seeing the full effects, but heaven help us when we get there. The most recent

A US National ID System Would Be a Recipe for Disaster

This article was originally posted at The Federalist. Kyle Sammin cogently argues that the United States should implement a voluntary national identity system in the wake of the Equifax hacking. Debate about this issue has roiled for decades. Although numerous countries have a national identification system, Americans have long resisted the idea. The Social Security number (SSN) has certainly expanded beyond its original purpose of serving as an account number for benefits, but policy-makers have repeatedly rejected calls to convert it into an identifier. The Clinton administration’s 1993 proposal of a “Health Security Card” never got off the ground, and even after the September 11, 2001

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