Core Curriculum Is…???

Ideally, Core Curriculum identifies the essential information and skills students need at all K-12 grade levels, in each of at least ten (10) disciplines. “We need standards to ensure that all students, no matter where they live, are prepared for success in postsecondary education and the workforce. Common standards will help ensure that students are receiving a high quality education consistently, from school to school and state to state. Common standards will provide a greater opportunity to share experiences and best practices within and across states that will improve our ability to best serve the needs of students.” This is a direct quote from the Common Core State Standards web page. Most educators agree.

In reality, since the Bush-era NCLB mandate, the Common Core State Standards Initiative led by the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, Council of Chief State School Officers, will not be developing standards in other subjects and are now focusing on only implementing the standards in ELA and mathematics. As a result, Core Standards in two areas are being used to determine the effectiveness of teachers and schools. District schools introducing and teaching essential skills and mastery in every major discipline (subject area) are compared with partial schools of choice that do not provide a whole education. This is part of the overall plan to access education tax dollars going to district public schools by discrediting teachers and educational leaders using incomplete information and false statistics. It is a minority-driven plan to access education tax dollars for profit, not for kids. It goes hand-in-hand with attempts to inculcate our children with fact-adverse, religious, cult, and ideological beliefs by using the “State’s Rights” issue to take over our schools.

More than forty years ago, educators in almost every state focused on 10 or more disciplines and identified the essential skills and mastery criteria necessary in each subject area. These essential skills, The True Core Curriculum, guide most good schools. They are curriculum-based, fact-based, interdisciplinary, comprehensive education programs. If we are to evaluate teachers and schools, then partial schools should not be allowed to trump whole schools by the use skewed statistics and limited criteria.

I have a book ready for download that focuses our discussions and helps identify the changes educators must make. The book is titled: Vital Lies: The Irrelevance Of Our Schools in the Information Age.  You can download it through this site.