The most surprising news about the changes in the Scholastic
Aptitude Test is that some leading media outlets failed to link the reforms to
the one man working hard to prop up revisions he’s already made to American
education.
Neither The New York Times nor Time magazine, in their main
stories announcing the reforms to the SAT, mentioned that the changes were
coming from Common Core’s leading advocate, David Coleman, who runs the College
Board, which owns, produces, writes and publishes the SAT test, taken by nearly
2 million high school students annually.
In other words, the question that remains unanswered is the combined commercial interests of Common Core and the College Board; if they're both linked -- and they give every appearance they will be soon -- what sort of money is at stake?
In other words, the question that remains unanswered is the combined commercial interests of Common Core and the College Board; if they're both linked -- and they give every appearance they will be soon -- what sort of money is at stake?
Common Core, nothing more than an all-out assault to dumb
down American education, is Coleman’s baby. He’s successfully pushed it – or, as he likes to say, it was
“voluntarily accepted” – by 45 states, some of which are now pushing back
against this latest reform effort.
Coleman is a former McKinsey & Company consultant. His educational background is
impressive, including a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Yale University,
and he was a Rhodes Scholar, earning another bachelor’s degree from Oxford, in
English Literature, and a master’s in ancient philosophy from Cambridge.[i]
Coleman never spent a day teaching kids. He may have made appearances here and
there in a classroom but he’s never been held accountable, professionally, to
make sure (the proverbial) Johnny can read, do math or understand science.
In other words, when it comes to day-to-day instruction and
how kids go about learning in a classroom setting, he’s clueless.
For that matter, from what I can gather on the College
Board’s website and others discussing his background, he doesn’t appear to be a
father.
I’m not going to go off on a tangent that one needs to be a
parent to fully understand public school education or what it’s like to teach
kids; but as a dad closely involved in his kids’ education, I’m here to say it
helps – big time!
Yet Coleman’s gained the ear of the high and mighty
interested in education, including Microsoft founder Bill Gates, President
Obama’s Education Secretary Arne Duncan and the National Governor’s Association
as he’s peddled Common Core.
The whole basis of Common Core, from key critics at places
like Harvard and Stanford universities, is that it slows math education,
putting American kids further behind their peers overseas, and it spends far
too much time on “informational texts” rather than literature and, as a result,
logical thinking skills are diminished.
Coleman is all about evidence-based education. In other words, he wants American kids
to consider, when it comes to literature, whether or not an author proved their
point. What evidence did they
provide, in other words.
Ask yourself, did Harper Lee, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway,
J.D. Salinger, and the many other leading authors in American literature, ever
prove a point?
Of course they didn’t.
They weren’t supposed to!
Their job was to tell a story rich in detail that captivated
readers’ imaginations, making them stop and think about their own lives as well
as the lives of the characters.
Since Coleman is such an advocate for evidence-based
education, we should wonder why he never proposed so much as a modest test, in
some community somewhere, where Common Core could be assessed and compared to
another community not using this latest reform effort.
Probably that’s due to his ego or he feared the worse – his
baby would fail.
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