American Educator Exposes the Fraud of Common Core

Dr. Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, has a must-read book entitled Drilling through the Core: Why Common Core Is Bad for American Education. Common Core is the education fad that swept the nation with the deceptive slogan “higher standards.” Everyone is for “higher standards,” right? However, the word “higher” did not mean higher intellectual content of the standards, but a higher percentage of students passing them. Simple math shows that the easiest way to get more students to pass a test is to lower the standards (or the passing score).

This goal was revealed in a famous “white paper” that Common Core architects wrote for the Carnegie Corporation. The education establishment quickly accepted the theory that new standards would help close the “achievement gap” between minority kids from poor families and students from middle-class homes.

Well, the results are now in. Far from closing the gap, Common Core makes the achievement gap even worse. In 2010, Kentucky was the first state to sign up for Common Core’s allegedly “higher standards,” with the help of federal money from the Obama administration. By 2012, Kentucky had fully implemented the standards and was administering statewide assessments aligned to Common Core. The results for the 2015 school year in Kentucky were recently published. Over three-years, the performance gap between black kids and white kids expanded to 27% in reading and to 24% in math. Now that the damage has been done to Kentucky’s lower-performing students, it’s easy to see why. Common Core math is based on the theory that students are expected to discover math principles for themselves, instead of memorizing time-tested math shortcuts that almost everyone can easily learn.

Phyllis Schlafly has been a national leader of the conservative movement since the publication of her best-selling 1964 book, A Choice Not An Echo. She has been a leader of the pro-family movement since 1972, when she started her national volunteer organization called Eagle Forum. In a ten-year battle, Mrs. Schlafly led the pro-family movement to victory over the principal legislative goal of the radical feminists, called the Equal Rights Amendment. An articulate and successful opponent of the radical feminist movement, she appears in debates on college campuses more frequently than any other conservative.