By Paul Bremmer
Among the long list of complaints Americans have leveled against Common Core is the charge that the controversial federal standards will disproportionately harm racial minority students. This charge comes not from Al Sharpton, but from at least two prominent black conservatives.
“Minority children are going to be hurt first and foremost by Common Core because they are stuck in the public schools, which are government schools,” Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson told WND.
“And even as adults, it will keep them in a state of helplessness and hopelessness because Common Core is going to dumb them down. [It] is going to make them feel that America is totally against them and that white people are holding them back. And they’re going to feel unprepared as adults to deal with life because they’re not going to be properly educated, that’s for sure.”
Peterson, a WND columnist and founder and president of The Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny, was referring to the fact that racial minorities are more likely than whites to be poor, thus many of them can’t pay their way into private schools that don’t use Common Core. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 27 percent of blacks and 24 percent of Hispanics lived in poverty in 2013, versus only 10 percent of whites.
Alveda King, a civil rights activist and niece of Martin Luther King Jr., shares Peterson’s worry. On May 22, King penned an open letter to the Alabama Legislature calling on the body to abandon what she called the “one size fits all Common Core curriculum.”
In the letter, King quoted a statement from the Chicago Teachers Union that read in part: “We also know that high-stakes standardized testing is designed to rank and sort our children and it contributes significantly to racial discrimination and the achievement gap among students in America’s schools.”
King then followed up: “This sorting of students in Alabama based on the color of their skin or their parents’ income and the setting of lower achievement goals for African Americans than Caucasians has been widely reported. If teachers are told to expect less from minorities, they are likely to get less.”
International journalist and educator Alex Newman, a white man but also a staunch Common Core opponent, said he agrees with King and the Chicago Teachers Union that Common Core is inherently racist.
Newman, coauthor of “Crimes of the Educators,” told WND:
“I have no doubt that Common Core will contribute to racial discrimination, and, as we show in our book, many of the architects of today’s progressive government education system were in fact proud eugenicists who ludicrously believed blacks and others to be ‘inferior.’ This is merely a continuation of that sordid pseudo-scientific legacy of racial oppression imposed by the progressive engineers of the government education system and their allies such as Margaret Sanger of Planned Parenthood.”
Two such eugenicist educators that Newman explores in his book are John Dewey and Edward L. Thorndike.
But for Peterson, King and Newman, racial bias is far from the only problem with Common Core. Peterson, author of “Scam: How the Black Leadership Exploits Black America,” lamented that Common Core attempts to make life and education subjective.
“It makes you believe that there are no rights and wrongs in life, it’s only what you think about it or feel about it,” Peterson said. “In math, for example, they don’t require you to figure out the problem and answer it correctly. They want you to write out how you came to a conclusion about a problem.
“They don’t want you to do critical thinking, which would enhance your ability to work out situations in life period, but especially in the area of math. They want no rights or wrongs, everything is the same. That’s not the way life is.”
In her letter to the Alabama legislators, King wrote: “All children need to and deserve to access their full God-given potential. By design, Common Core treats every child as a statistic to be measured by standardized tests.”
Newman concurred, but went further.
“Not only does Common Core treat every child like a statistic, it treats them all as animals to be conditioned and indoctrinated with experimental quackery and propaganda, rather than properly educated to be critical thinkers,” he said. “This is unacceptable and totally unsuitable for a free people.”
In his book “Crimes of the Educators,” coauthored with Samuel Blumenfeld, Newman chronicled some of the “experimental quackery and propaganda” being used in public schools.
For example, many teachers are using a teaching method called “cooperative learning” in their classrooms. The teacher divides the class into groups of four or five and holds each student responsible for the learning of the entire group. When the students do an assignment, the teacher takes one group member’s paper and assigns that grade to each group member. The students all take quizzes and tests separately, but the teacher averages the group members’ scores and assigns each member the average. Newman contends this teaching method mirrors Communist practice.
Also, according to Newman, public schools are now teaching children to reject the religious beliefs their parents taught them. The schools are teaching that evolution is settled science and thus life has no spiritual dimension with any transcendent meaning.
“Basically, the children are taught to think of themselves as no better or more important than their pets,” Newman and Blumenfeld claimed.
But to Newman, the most important form of “quackery” going on in government schools is the way in which schools are teaching children to read. The “whole-word” method encourages kids to memorize words by sight as whole units, rather than sounding them out based on the letters that constitute them. Newman argues the whole-word method causes literal brain damage in children, while the traditional phonics-based method is the best way to teach children to read.
Newman has long contended that Common Core was designed to intentionally dumb down America’s children, and Peterson agrees.
“The children are going to be brainwashed, because Common Core is not about educating the kids, reading, writing and arithmetic, and the good, true history of this country,” Peterson declared. “It’s really about dumbing down, brainwashing and demoralizing the kids. That’s why the federal government should not be involved in education. It should come from the states – a local issue, not a federal issue.”
Conservative icon Phyllis Schlafly, author of “Who Killed the American Family?,” concurred that education should be a local issue. In fact, she told WND the federal nature of Common Core is its biggest problem.
“It federalizes what is taught and not taught to our children, and we do not want federal control of what they are taught and not taught,” Schlafly said. “What we’ve learned from the tests that we’ve seen on American history, they have distorted the whole early period, the colonial period as our mistreatment of the Indians, and somehow they didn’t find George Washington and James Madison and the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence very important.”
Newman, echoing King’s letter, also cited loss of local control over education as a chief drawback of Common Core.
“We know competition works and one-size-fits-all models are a failure,” Newman said. “It is simply outrageous that parents and local communities are being stripped of their right to self-government and to control the education of their children. Alabama and every other state ensnared by federal bribes into this Common Core nightmare must, for the sake of the children and the future of this nation, toss these absurd and terrible standards into the trash where they belong.”
from PropagandaGuard https://propagandaguard.wordpress.com/2015/05/29/black-leaders-common-core-inherently-racist/
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