American schools are producing illiterates by the millions
and burning through dollars by the billions – and it’s all by design, according
to international journalist and educator Alex Newman.
“It’s no accident that we’re getting the kinds of terrible
education results that we’re seeing right now,” Newman said in a recent
interview on “The Steve Malzberg Show.”
“Common Core is not going to fix this problem, and neither are these federally funded tests,” he said.
“Common Core is not going to fix this problem, and neither are these federally funded tests,” he said.
In his new book, “Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians are
Using Government Schools to Destroy America’s Children,” coauthored with Samuel Blumenfeld, Newman reveals just how
bad the situation is.
For example, three-quarters of American students who earn a
high-school diploma are unprepared for college coursework. Thirty percent of
high-school graduates can’t pass the U.S. military entrance exam, which is
focused on basic reading and math skills. More than 600,000 U.S. manufacturing
jobs sit vacant because there aren’t enough qualified candidates to fill them.
Across the country this spring, students are scheduled to
take federally funded tests that align with the Common Core standards. The
resistance already has been strong. In most areas where the tests are not
mandatory, many students have chosen to opt out of the testing.
New York State has emerged as the
center of resistance to Common Core. In some school districts, well over half of the students refused to take their Common Core-aligned tests this spring.
In one Long Island district, 82 percent of students opted out. One teachers’
union, New York State United Teachers, has actually encouraged parents to opt
their kids out of the tests.
Newman is delighted to see so much resistance to Common
Core. “It is extremely encouraging to witness the growing resistance to Common
Core and the massive numbers of students and parents that are choosing to opt
out of this Orwellian, federally funded testing regime,” he told WND.
“The controversial tests, in addition to serving as one of
the primary enforcement mechanisms for the Obama administration-backed Common
Core fiasco, are gathering unimaginable amounts of data on children for use by
federal education bureaucrats. This is simply unacceptable, and it is great to
see parents and teachers defying this outrageous plan.”
Common Core has faced criticism from both the left and the
right. “It is encouraging to see this growing alliance against Common Core that
transcends party lines, ideology, and every other division,” he said. “As we
show in our book, the Common Core nightmare is bringing Americans together like
never before to take a fundamental look at what is going on in the government
education system. This is a very healthy and extremely positive development
that should have come decades ago.
“The American people need to stand united against Common
Core and the associated tests, and one of the best ways to do that, at this
point, is to simply refuse to participate. If policymakers continue to ignore
the public outcry, they do so at their own peril.”
Newman believes lawmakers are not
truly interested in what the public thinks of Common Core because the lawmakers
want to use it to dumb down American children. In “Crimes of the Educators,” Newman and Blumenfeld write about John Dewey, the
progressive education reformer of the late 1800s and early 1900s.
The authors argue that Dewey and his allies developed a new
method of teaching children to read, called the whole-word method, that has had
disastrous results. Newman laments that the whole-word method is still being
taught in many public schools today.
“They literally teach the kids to read English as if it were
Chinese rather than the traditional phonics method that has worked since time
immemorial, and that’s at the root of so many of the problems we have in our
country today,” Newman explained on Malzberg’s show.
Politicians and education bureaucrats often claim that
students are doing so poorly in school because governments don’t spend enough
money on education, so their proposed solutions are very costly, Newman points
out.
For example, it was estimated in 2014 that states would have to spend $10 billion up front to
implement Common Core and then up to $800 million per year for the first seven
years of the program.
Newman thinks federal and state governments are stuck in an
endless cycle of spending money on strategies that don’t work. But he believes
the cycle will never end on its own because the powers-that-be don’t want
American children to get smarter.
“The educational establishment will never put a stop to it
on its own,” he declared. “The American people need to find out what’s going
on. They don’t need more billions, they need less billions, and they need to be
exposed.”
Comments
Ruining the US education system was one of
the goals listed by American Communist Party in 1920. They achieved this by having labor unions
write education bills for Democrats to introduce. Also, their infiltration into both parties
and control of the media has been successful.
We need to push back to remove these destructive elements or “throw in
the towel”.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
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